


within a shadowed forest

by gogollescent



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angels Fall, F/M, Gen, everyone dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-21
Updated: 2011-11-21
Packaged: 2017-10-26 09:29:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/281445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Adam… succumbs to his inner Son of Satan, when the time comes. Adam being Adam, this still involves a little rewriting of the Plan. Written for the 2010 Good Omens Holiday Exchange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	within a shadowed forest

**IN THE END**

**  
**

There were four children in a quarry, sitting on an old milk crate, and one of them was talking. The other three listened. There was no way they could have avoided listening to him, in that moment, though the air in the quarry felt like a knife held just against the skin, and lightning ripped apart the sky overhead. 

It was coming on 8 p.m. It had not been a nice day. 

“I’ve got some more friends coming,” Adam was saying. “They’ll be here soon, and then we can really get started.”

And, as it happens, you know how this story went. But the trouble with this story, as with all stories, is that they change when you look away. 

So look. Look back.

Look at Pepper, who had been sitting staring at her knees, and who raised her head, now, eyes bright with the kind of anger that is really just terror: terror backed up into a corner and seeing, all too clearly, how the future will go. She had had something else on her mind, but… 

“Other friends?” she said, indignantly. “ _We’re_  your friends.”

“Yeah,” said Brian. He crossed his arms. “We’ve always been your friends. Since forever an’ ever ago.”

“You’ve never needed  _other_  friends before,” said Wensleydale, pushing his spectacles up higher; they kept slipping down the bridge of his nose, because of the sheen of perspiration developing there. “Don’t see why you need ‘em now.”

“What?” said Adam.

The Them drew closer together, unconsciously. They wore identical expressions under freckles, glasses and grime.

“Seems to me,” said Pepper, “seems to  _me_ , if we’re goin’ to cut up the world, we ought to do it ourselves.”

“All for one,” murmured Wensleydale.

“An’ all that sort of thing,” finished Brian, grandly.

“I--”

Adam hesitated. The world, spinning, slowed on its axis. 

This might conceivably have been a side effect of what was happening to the moon, which was being packed up early-- the archangel Gabriel liked to think of himself as a forward planner[1] and had released uncounted memos over the millennia to make sure that everyone else thought of him that way too. But probably it was the significance of the moment that was responsible. No one was paying much attention to gravity at this stage in the game.

Weightless, then, the planet waited: its future hanging, not on any golden string, but on a word.

[1] In this, he was unusual among his brethren: most angels preferred to rain fire first and explain its importance to the Plan after. A healthy supply of backward Planners is an essential part of any really impressive bureaucracy, and Heaven is no exception to the rule. It never is[2].

[2] Except possibly for “No shirt, no shoes, no service.” 

 

It has been observed, by a more illustrious pair of narrators than the current, that people are fundamentally people. It has been said, too, that this can serve to explain most of the major events which, when lined up just so, make history. 

This is not history. In this moment, here and now, with people being what they are…  _anything_  could happen. That’s the whole point.

The point of points, though, is that they are sharp. When practically applied, they almost always hurt. And as a rule the  _really_  religious prefer voodoo to acupuncture.

Somewhere, an angel is telling America,  _It won’t be like that at all. Not really._  

He’s right, as it happens. He’s always right about that. Every single time[1].

[1] Except in the version of this universe that formed in St. John of Patmos’ head after a particularly bad batch of mushrooms, and stayed around just long enough to get written down. But that doesn’t count. That’s not very impressive, as a lifespan for a whole universe. The mushrooms stayed around for longer.

 

“You’re right,” said Adam, slowly.

The Them breathed in. The world whirled.

“You’re  _right_ ,” Adam said, with more assurance.

He slid off the milk crate, and stood. The ground shook a little under his trainers, but the Them didn’t hold that against it; they would have done the same, in its place.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Together. We’ll do it. We’ll do it ourselves.”

There was a silence. It was expectant on Adam’s part and mystified on everyone else’s, which division had the advantage of being familiar, at least.

“Go where?” said Brian, at last.

“The air base, of course, ” Adam said. In the strangeness of the light, his face looked almost human as he smiled. 

The Them did not meet one another’s eyes.

“Come on,” he told them. “We’ve got to beat the rush. You’d better go an’ get your bikes, I think. And then we’ll see.”

 

Index cards went everywhere, like startled birds, although they did not evacuate their bowels before fluttering away. “I’ll never be able to sort them out now,” Anathema said.

“You don’t have to,” said Newt manically. “Just pick one. Any one. It won’t matter.”

And Newt too was right. Anathema gave him an impatient look and went back to rummaging through the mess under her seat, but every word he’d just uttered was both nice and accurate. However little it would have comforted him to know it.

 

The Them biked in silence.

Actually, they biked in a bubble of small sounds, like the persistent rattling of Pepper’s bike (incognito[1]); and the yapping of Dog, whose nerves were all over the place[2]. But no one said anything. A casual observer would have had to beat off the things unsaid with a stick.

There were no casual observers. R.P. Tyler was still half a mile and two plastic baggies away, as yet, and the Them biked past a certain fallen signpost entirely unbothered by other people.

Adam pulled up a little way from the base. The others stopped when he did, whether or not they’d been quick enough to brake in time. 

“What’re we stopping for?” said Pepper, with one foot still on a pedal.

“We’ve can’t take these with us,” said Adam, waving a hand at the bikes. “Someone might notice.”

The Them weren’t sure why Adam would care about someone noticing, but they did as they were told. They were feeling better, now. He was their leader. He was leading them, and only them, which was right. It was practically like old days, especially when his back was to them.

They reached the gate. Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, who had been having a good if unexciting day up till then, gave them a professional once-over. “Hey--” he began.

“Sleep,” said Adam.

Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger dropped to the ground slowly. He was a tall man, and there was a lot of him to drop. When he was a uniformed heap on the tarmac, Adam hopped over his out-flung arm, and headed in, towards one of the buildings, and the Them followed. 

They walked in real silence, now. Adam didn’t believe in alarms[3].

[1] That is, with sheets of cardboard attached to the unacceptably girly bits.

[2] Literally. The senses of a hellhound go a long way, though only in one direction.

[3] The smoke detectors in the Young household had been nonfunctional for about six months. The alarm clocks had been nonfunctional since almost a month before Adam was born, a thorough understanding of cause and effect never having been one of Adam’s strengths.

 

Sgt. Deisenburger had a very nice sleep, and dreamed of the things he liked best. 

He did not wake up even when War nudged him in the side with the glossy toe of her boot. This was an event unprecedented in War’s six thousand years of experience, and she viewed it with interest and concern. She was about to take further steps[1], when Death said, DO NOT BOTHER. 

“Sorry?”

HE DID THIS, said Death.

“He-- oh.”

YES.

“Is there some kind of roundabout that doesn’t get to me?” asked Famine.

“The Antichrist,” said Pollution, not unkindly, “has arrived.”

Famine frowned. “But that’s not how it goes,“ he said. “We’re supposed to come first, and set everything in motion, and then he--”

PLANS CHANGE, said Death.

“Not these plans.”

Death did not answer immediately. He walked around Sgt. Deisenburger’s outflung arm and the fine dry dust did not rise from under his heels. When he did speak, it was to say, very finally:

HE IS HERE.

[1] Onto Sgt. Deisenburger’s prone body, if at all possible.

 

“What’re we waiting for?” said Pepper.

“We need some things,” said Adam. “A sword, and some scales, and a crown.”

“Where’re we supposed to get those?” Brian asked.

“There,” said Adam, pointing.

 

“Where?” said War.

COME, said Death, AND SEE.

 

Around the horizon, clouds unspooled like yarn. The circle of sun directly above turned their roiling threads to gold.

The Them watched as the Four approached. 

They looked, Pepper thought, quite human, for nightmares. The woman’s hair burned the eye, but the Them were used to that: they were jaded veterans of the Bottled Dye Wars[1], and had, among other things, watched Adam’s older sister Sarah go through an entire spectrum of hair colours ranging from red[2] to redder[4] when she was fifteen. Unlike Sarah, the woman wore her hair, not the other way around, but it was still… recognisable. In a way. And the man in the suit looked a bit like one of Wensleydale’s father’s coworkers, and the young man with the glazed-over eyes would have fit right in on one of the posters at school, with “COMING OUT IN THEATRES THIS JANUARY” printed large on the bottom, or, alternatively, “DRUGS: JUST SAY NO”.

As for the skeleton, the one in the biology classroom was scarier; it had eyeballs, for one thing.

“Get ready,” Adam whispered to the Them. “You know what to do.”

They nodded, grimly. They knew what to do.

[1] The casualties were mainly shower caps, although the kitchen sink would bear battle scars to the end of its days.

[2] Alias ‘Rich Pale Mahogany With A Hint Of Blackberry’ [3].

[3] The marketers believed in taking inspiration where they found it, even if that was in a wine bottle, or, more frequently, on the label on the wine bottle’s slightly sticky side, during the morning after they’d conspicuously missed that deadline.

[4] Alias ‘Dark Glossy Burgundy #1971, And What A Good Year That Was, Too’.

 

R.P. Tyler went by the Youngs’ house every day for his evening constitutional; and in at least one way this day was no different from any other.

“Evening, Young,” he called out to Mr. Young, who was smoking on the deck.

Mr. Young gave him a calm look that revealed just enough irritation at this form of address to convey his real feelings, in much the same way the flash of a piranha’s fin in dark water can say more than the entire fish leaping out to bite your face, not least because, while biting your face, its mouth is too full to talk.

“Evening,” he said, blowing a ring.

R.P. Tyler, who had had a rather nice walk, and who had gotten to give three separate sets of directions-- one to some motorcyclists, one to a young man whose car had been on fire, and one to a ventriloquist-- decided to let this pass. He was in a good mood. He’d already decided that the car couldn’t have been on fire, not  _really_ , and that it was all down the unhealthy excesses of youth.

He tromped onward. Shutzi snuffled after.

Mr. Young sent another ring rising through the first one, and leaned back, in his chair.

 

In both of the skull’s sockets, something bright flared.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND, said Death.

“You don’t have to,” said Adam, his smile sweet.

They stared at each other: the boy and Death. The dark under the cowl reflected in Adam’s pupils, and the blue of his eyes was there in Death’s, burning at the bottom of the dark.

“Now,” Adam said.

Neither he nor Death looked up when War screamed, though for once her voice had no metallic overtones. It was just a scream.

“Take it, Pepper,” Adam said.

Neither looked up when Famine said, “ _No--_ ”

“Yes,” Adam said.

And neither looked up when Pollution ran, his shoes scraping earth. 

“Go on,” Adam said.

Brian had Adam’s voice in his ears. He ran faster.

When, after a time, Pollution began to weep, Death’s head turned as though dragged. The Three were huddled behind him now, in utter disarray: hands empty and heads bare, twitching with wordless shock. 

He swept around again in time to see the Them arrange themselves at Adam’s back in a defensive square. They looked strangely impressive. The stolen silver overwhelmed the fact of their size, the cartoon designs on their T-shirts, their uncertainty: its glow was in every square inch of their skin.

Adam said, “You’ve got to do what I say, now.”

I AM AZRAEL, said Death. I AM NOT LIKE THEM. YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE MY JOB.

He straightened, slowly. Wings opened out of his robe in a flare of black, like the first burst of colour as a droplet of ink hits water. 

And far above, in the fullness of the sky, invisible pinions tightened sympathetically as his unrolled. The ranks of Heaven and Hell felt the wind begin to blow, harder than before.

“I know you aren’t,” said Adam. “That’s why you’ve got to do what I say.”

A pause. Death grinned. 

I HAVE WAITED FOR THIS A LONG TIME, ADAM YOUNG, he said. ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

“I know,” Adam repeated. “You think I don’t know?”

Death said nothing.

There was a commotion coming from the gates. Adam, more interested in the commotion that wasn’t coming from the sky, tilted his head back. It no longer took much to make out the details of the assembled armies. They had no real volume, but they occupied the space in spite of it, their eagerness distorting the light.

“This is what’s goin’ to happen,” he told the Them. “Brian, when I say go, you throw that crown up, just as hard as you can. Wensley--” He thought for a bit. “Wensley, you c’n swing the scales, so they spin.”

He thought for a bit more. “And Pepper?”

“Huh?” said Pepper, who had been watching the fuss that was taking place at the gate, where a middle-aged woman and a shapeless little figure wrapped in plaid and a man in sunglasses were getting out of a van.

“You stick that in the ground,” said Adam. “You stick it good.”

“Oh,” she said, distantly. “Yes.”

 

LEAVE NOW, said Death, to the Three.

“This isn’t what we were promised,” hissed War.

NO, Death agreed. 

Light glinted off bone in a suspiciously humourous fashion. War wavered for a moment, then spat blood and stalked off.

“This isn’t the last you’ll hear of this,” said Famine, coldly, wiping his hands on his tailored suit, which showed the stains, for once, like dark mouths opening in the weave of the fabric.

I’M SURE, said Death. Famine limped away.

Pollution, though, didn’t look well. Certainly not well enough for locomotion.

“You…” he moaned.

I, said Death, as gently as was possible, in a voice like the falling of stone on stone.

 

“Now,” Adam said.

 

In the end, the Them did what they were told.

There should have been sound effects, there at the last. But there was only the questionable music of silver. Silver and air and silver and silver and silver and old stone; and Adam, hands agleam.

 

If you took the world away and just left the electricity-- well, you’d never get anything really interesting done.

So Adam, considerately, took away the electricity. And he took away the poisons, and he took away the cities, and he took away the walls; and in their place he put things right.

It helped, of course, that by then matters was already in motion. Take the Kappamaki, for instance, along with all the whaling ships like it, floating bemused on a winedark sea. Just as the sword’s tip broke the crust of the hard-packed dirt, the kraken broke the surface of the water. 

Matters moved. There was, very shortly afterward, no trace of boat left, except in the contented gleam of the kraken’s open mouth.

In its wake Adam put live whales, thinking of Anathema. He remembered who his friends were, after all.

 

Anathema was crouching by the hole in the fence, her arms shielding her head. Newt held onto her. He pressed his nose against her shoulder, his glasses skewing in the process, until all he could see was blurred brilliance coming in around the edge of her neck. She was crying, he realised. 

The soldier who was supposed to be guarding the hole sat down next to them. “Get a room,” he suggested, not unkindly, and added, “We could all do with a room, a time like this.”

“It’s over,” Anathema kept saying. She had index cards clamped down between her fingers and her plaster-dusted hair like a veil. Married to her work, Newt thought, and had a horrible urge to laugh. 

The wind was rising.

“It’s all over.”

But it wasn’t, yet, Newt almost replied. That was the worst thing. They’d come too late, but that didn’t mean it was over. That just meant they were getting front row seats.

He didn’t say it. Her eyes were terribly green.

 

And green…

…spread over the Earth, seeping into places it had not touched for millennia. From space, the planet looked now like a fire opal at some unseen dancer’s throat, colour slithering in clear dark depths as it wheeled across the night. 

The deserts flowered; and in the rainforests, flowers began to seek out dessert. Preferably raw. 

The green spread. Under it, people died, vanished, climbed: not always in that order. 

Adam listened, and when he was satisfied with the lush quality of quiet, he moved on. There was a lot of Earth, he thought. It was a good thing he was there, finally, to take care of it.

 

Now consider the Them, who had, to a one, made their choice.

Brian had one hand stretched toward the sky, his short, compact body lifting as if pulled up by a single string, hooked in his palm. The crown, thrown, dangled overhead at the summit of its arc. Wensleydale, to his left, was watching in fascination as the fine chains of the scales wrapped around, and around, and around.

Pepper was on one knee. Her eyes were closed. Her knuckles were white.

There were other people, there: the unlikely party from the van and, forming rapidly in the background, two men of fire. But the Them composed the foreground. And Adam, of course, was the focal point.

He glanced over his shoulder at the gathering adults, who wanted to interrupt. Who thought that they could change what was happening by _talking_. To  _him_. About his  _father_. He looked down, and then up. His face took on an expression of mild disgust.

There was a moment of conflict. But Adam was on his own ground. It was  _his ground_. He’d made it so.

His hand moved in a blurred half circle.

 

There was light.

  
****

**  
ELEVEN MINUTES AGO**

 

Crowley closed his eyes when the light started, but he didn’t get a chance to open them again because the next thing he knew he was in Hell, where eyelids are frowned upon. Often from great heights. At least, he thought it was Hell. There was a shadow taking up most of his view. 

Crowley squinted at it. The shadow, helpfully, resolved itself into a Duke of Hell.

Well. That settled that, and also quite a few other questions his brain had been lining up, like, ‘am I going to get out of this in one piece?’ and ‘will there be grapes?’

“Hello, Crawly,” said Hastur.

“Hi,” said Crowley. He felt very calm. It was probably some kind of flash of prophetic insight he was having. Probably sheerest oblivion was quite a calm state to be in, he reasoned, and probably he’d get there eventually, after a few longish eternities of pain.

“You’re in  _trouble_ , Crawly,” said Hastur. He did not smile.

“Really?” said Crowley brightly.

“This way,” the duke growled, and took him by the memory of a shoulder. 

With less ado than he might have liked, Crowley found himself being marched deeper into the Pit.

 

“Aziraphale,” said the Metatron, “you have strayed.”

“Really,” said Aziraphale. He made a game attempt to sit up, but possessing people always left his ectoplasm confused and he ended up just wobbling into a more vertical pile of angelic presence on the Metatron’s office’s otherwise immaculate carpet.

“Yes,” said the Metatron, little tongues of flame snapping off its face.

Aziraphale nodded.

“What exactly… just happened?” he asked.

The Metatron sniffed.

“We are looking into it,” it said. “But as for you…”

Its mouth curved upward. The smile was not unpleasant: it was simply the smile of a bad job well brushed under the rug.

“See for yourself,” it said.

 

Crowley stared at the light. It cut through the dark ceiling of Dis and reached down to the ground in a flawless white column.

“What,” he said.

“Yeah,” agreed Hastur, grudgingly. “’s’not natural.”

“I-- no,” said Crowley. “Um. Is that--”

Hastur did smile, then.

“You lucky bastard,” he said, “you’re getting your old job back.”

“Oh, no,” said Crowley.

“Oh, yes,” said Hastur.

“Oh, no,” said Crowley.

“Oh, y-- for crying out loud, have a little self respect, why don’t you.”

He punctuated this kind advice with a push.

“Oh, nooo _ooooooo_ ,” said Crowley, stumbling, and--

_Schloop_ , went the light.

 

“Sorry?” said Aziraphale. “You’re what?”

“Giving you your job back,” said the Metatron, calmly.

“But you said--”

“Second chances are policy,” said the Metatron. 

It pressed a button. A wall slid back, and the light poured in. Aziraphale began to tremble as only a morphically confused mass of spiritual essence can.

“We look forward to your report,” said the Metatron, in a way that did not invite further questions.

Aziraphale, for want of any more palatable options and, indeed, any options at all, went to the light. The Metatron’s blank gaze followed him all the way across the floor.

_Schloop_.

The Metatron cocked its head to one side.

“Curious,” it said.

Then it went back to the paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork on its desk, and there would be more. Very shortly.

 

 

**SUNDAY**   
**  
(The rest of their lives.)**

 

It was a day. 

It would have been impossible to say whether it was a nice one or not, because the forest canopy was a solid mass overhead, a second firmament: but it was certainly a day of some kind, because Aziraphale could hear birds singing, somewhere. 

He also heard a voice say, from the general vicinity of his foot, "Well,  _that_  one went down like a lead balloon."

"Sorry?" he said, taking a wary step backward.

A sleek triangular head rose out of the ferny mulch. "I  _said_ \--" the snake began.

"That's all right, actually," said Aziraphale, holding up a hand. He paused, and added, "Hello, Crowley," and rubbed his eyes.

Crowley snorted in a way that was neither polite nor convincingly serpentine.

“Huh,” he said.

Aziraphale took another step back, and sat down on what he assumed was a log. In a way he was correct-- it hadn’t been up till then, but when an angel assumes something is a log, it’s the loglike object that’s in for a surprise. 

“Well,” he said. “Erm. I don’t suppose you’ve any idea… is the War…?”

“The War’s off,” said Crowley. “Or else they’re holding it on the moon, or something. There’s no one here.” He slid over, as he spoke, to coil by Aziraphale’s bare feet. 

Aziraphale sniffed. The air in the rainforest was thick with moisture; and it was true that the smell of things growing and rotting and living, unseen and untended, was not a smell that had anything to do with waiting armies. 

“What about the humans?” he asked.

Crowley said, bitterly, “What about them?”

“Where did they all go?”

Crowley tried to shrug, and ended up in a sprawl of persistently shoulderless muscle. “Where do humans ever go?”

Neither of them spoke again for a while after that.

 

Anathema hadn’t gone anywhere. She hadn’t moved once, all through the night. Newt woke-- came to, really-- with her still in his arms.

“Hey,” he said, quietly. And then, louder, “Um. Anathema?”

“Looks to me like nobody’s home,” drawled the ex-guard. The hole and the fence both having vanished long since, he’d declared himself off-duty, doffed his helmet and lain down in the newly luxuriant bushes, his arms behind his head. He looked quite comfortable, thought Newt enviously. Newt, who could be uncomfortable in a spa and indeed had on multiple occasions broken out in a rash on contact with warm, soothing, herbally infused steam[1], rather thought he would rupture something if he stayed on the ground another minute.

“Rise and shine,” he suggested to Anathema, hopefully. She didn’t stir.

“She was crazy,” said the ex-guard. “Didn’t you hear her? Screaming like a fuckin’ banshee.”

“Shut up,” said Newt.

The ex-guard started to say something, but Newt didn’t hear what, because then Anathema stood up, dragging Newt with her as she unfolded. 

He untangled himself hastily. She shook her head, as if to clear it, and looked around.

“Where are we?”

“The airbase,” said Newt.

Anathema said, “This isn’t the airbase.”

“Well, it was,” said Newt, a little irritated. “The trees are new.”

Anathema walked past him to the edge of the clearing, and laid a hand on one of the new trees, which had gleaming, leathery bark and a lacy beard of strange crisp lichens.

“Uh,” said Newt, “touching that is probably--”

“Agnes didn’t write this,” said Anathema.

“Yes, well--”

“Who?” said the ex-guard.

“We’re still here,” she said.

“Yes, I know--”

“Who’s this Agnes?” demanded the ex-guard, propping himself up on his elbow. “Are you lot journalists?”

“No, but we know a lot about the newspaper business,” Newt said, under his breath.

“She was my great-great-great-to-the-umpteenth-grandmother,” said Anathema, briskly. “She foretold all this, except for the parts she didn’t.”

The ex-guard considered this. Newt closed his eyes.

“I’ve got an aunt who’s like that,” said the ex-guard, after a pause. “’specially after two gins.”

“Yes,” said Anathema, “probably.” 

She gave him a brilliant smile, and then, when he began to smile uncertainly back, hit him over the head with a stick, quite hard. And it occurred to Newt, watching, that she must have been holding the stick the whole time. The whole night through.

He wondered what she'd intended to use it for before.

The ex-guard yelped and toppled sideways wearing a surprised expression. Newt waited for his eyes to roll up in his head, like in the movies, but all that happened was a steady stream of profanity.

“…the hell did you do that for?” he moaned, clutching his skull.

“This,” said Anathema smartly, pulling the gun out of the man’s other, unresisting hand. “Let’s go,” she told Newt.

“Absolutely,” said Newt, staring at the guard, who was still conscious, and had begun to cry softly, and looked like he would shortly regain the hand-eye coordination necessary to punch someone. “no problem, whatever you want--”

Anathema took his hand.

“…oh,” said Newt.

“Let’s go now,” Anathema said. She hefted the gun. “Do you know how to use one of these?”

“For what, exactly?” Newt asked. “I could probably use it to prop up a stool, or, or beautify a mantelpiece--”

Her mouth tasted like mouths generally do before their owners have brushed their teeth. Newt leaned into the kiss, and felt the dampness on her face transfer to his, and wondered what it meant to be so unbearably happy on this morning, of all the mornings he had ever known. 

There was vivid moss clinging to her hair, he noticed. And in her open eyes he could just about make out the alien twists of the forest, behind them.

He breathed in.

[1] Newt was not allergic to any one plant species and his reaction to the spa’s atmospheric elements had mystified the doctors he’d seen about it. Newt suspected that what he was really allergic to was aromatherapy, but he’d never told anyone that, for fear of being thought odd.

 

Elsewhere in what had been the airbase, the Them stirred, as statues do in charmingly illustrated yet subtly horrifying children’s stories after the people have all gone from the public squares.

“Pepper? Wensleydale? Brian?”

They blinked at him owlishly.

“I want to show you all something,” said Adam. “One at a time.”

He smiled, almost shyly. He looked very young.

“Who wants to go first?”

“Me,” blurted Brian. 

The other two stared at him. “I want to,” he said, defiantly. 

And then, without any special effects, he rose into the air. 

When he realised what was happening he began to flail like a boy possessed, which in the most technical sense of term, he was; but by then he was barely more than a grubby dot in the blue heavens. Adam went at a more leisurely pace, arms stretched out in front of him like a superhero’s. There was something cartoonish about his upraised face, too; the brightness of morning simplified his features, and drew straight lines of shade over his skin, at least while he was still close enough to appear to have skin at all.

Pepper’s sword made a scraping sound when she wrenched it out of the Earth.

“D’you think he’ll be all right?” she said.

“Who?” asked Wensleydale, tiredly.

Pepper bit her lip.

 

“You all right?” Adam said.

“I’m feelin’ just fine,” said Brian, firmly. His face was clean, for once, washed pale by cold sweat over the course of the night and, subsequently, the flight. His usual light furring of dirt had been dragged down by the slide of water, and was drying on the underside of his jaw.

Adam looked doubtfully at him. “Well,” he said, nodding to what lay far too far below, “that’s Africa.”

It was.

“Gosh,” said Brian, and tried very hard not to throw up.

Adam clapped him on the back in a way that Adam had never done before.

“It’ll be great,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Brian nodded slightly. He’d taken to moving his head by very small degrees to minimize sloshing, in the past hour. 

He was going, he thought, to be sick.

 

According to Pepper, Wensleydale was next. Wensleydale didn’t quite see how she’d reached that conclusion when she told him so, but when she pushed him forward the instant Adam and Brian returned, then he got it.

He also got America. He didn’t like America much, either. 

He especially didn’t like America from miles and miles up: but that was where he was. He was miles above America. He was also floating comfortably in a nimbus of blue, and that would have been great, only he had a suspicion that the instant Adam got distracted he’d be falling from miles above America in a nimbus of red. On the whole, Wensleydale had had better Sundays, down to and including the ones with all his aunts in.

“That bit’s yours,” said Adam, softly, his fingertip describing the curl of the continent laid out below.

It's just a lot of dirt, Wensleydale thought, with some clarity. The people are... are hiding... and what's mine is dirt and trees and big, hungry animals and probably no flavours of ice cream at all.

Adam was looking at him.

“Thank you,” said Wensleydale, politely.

“'Welcome,” said Adam, and starlight, unsoftened by much intermediary air, flashed off his teeth as he grinned.

 

And:

“It’s bigger than I expected it to be,” said Pepper, a shade critically. 

“It’s the biggest continent,” said Adam. “By-- by  _lots_.”

“Huh,” said Pepper.

“There’s room here for anything you want,” said Adam.

Pepper twisted onto her back, until she was looking up at the blackness of space.

“Yeah,” she said. “I expect.”

 

“This is England, isn’t it,” said Crowley.

“Probably,” said Aziraphale, and, “Was.”

“We could…”

“Yes?”

Crowley stared at nothing.

Actually, he stared at a chameleon that had emerged from a profusion of glistening leaves. It had spines, and it was as tastelessly green as the foliage, and the skin of its flanks looked almost glassy. He hadn’t seen one like it since the day it’d been named.

“We could go back to Lower Tadfield,” he said.

“Walk there, d’you mean?” said Aziraphale.

Crowley hissed. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“I don’t, actually,” said the angel, coldly. “What are we supposed to do once we’re there? Admire the gardens?”

“I don’t think there are any gardens left,” said Crowley. The chameleon had vanished, quick as the curl of light on the leaves it left shuddering in its wake.

Aziraphale made an exasperated sound. “We haven’t--”

“--anything better to do,” Crowley finished, smoothly. “Listen, I’m not saying… let’s just go look, all right? We can go and see. Find a river, or something, an open space where you can fly up, and… look.”

“Charming,” said the angel. But he got off the log[1].

Crowley took the opportunity to attach himself to his leg.

“I  _say_ \--” said the angel.

“It’s practical! It’s practical!” said Crowley. 

“Practical,” said Aziraphale, “would be you shedding the silly snakesuit and--”

“I can’t.”

Aziraphale raised an eyebrow.

“Really,” said Crowley. “You think I’d still be on my belly if I had any better options?”

“You’re not on your belly,” said Aziraphale, “just now. More’s the pity.”

His eyes glinted dangerously. This did not escape Crowley, who decided he was going to magnanimously overlook the angel’s rudeness, for the time being. 

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said. “Otherwise one or the other of us won’t be able to keep up, and I’m not entirely sure which, don’t look at me like that, snakes are lithe, and we want to stick together, don’t we?”

Aziraphale stared at his ensnared ankle.

“I think so,” he said, “but at the moment I’m hard-pressed to recall why.”

Crowley smiled like a human. This was quite a feat.

“The Arrangement’s not over,” he said.

“It was never meant to last past Armageddon,” Aziraphale said.

“No,” said Crowley. “It was never meant to last past the end of the world. The world’s not gone, exactly, is it.”

Aziraphale harrumphed. But he didn’t argue, Crowley noticed, and after another moment he began to pick his way toward the sound of running water, not far off.

[1] Which promptly resumed its interrupted career as an alligator[2]. It waited until the two-legged food and, more importantly, the two-legged food’s bottom had wandered off into the woods before moving, however. It had too many splinters for its liking as it was.

[2] Though ever after, it would feel the occasional urge to float around in the mud and do nothing. Since it was an alligator, this did not result in any noticeable change in its behavioral patterns.

 

The Them regrouped in the quarry, which looked exactly like it had yesterday.

“Let’s have a war,” said Adam. 

There was a silence.

“Who with?” Brian asked, eventually.

Adam gave this due consideration for all of a sixth of a second.

“It’ll be us,” he said firmly. “Me and Pepper against you and Wensley.”

“Oh,” said Wensleydale. Pepper elbowed him in the ribs and jerked her head urgently at Brian, so he added, with false heartiness, “Sounds brilliant.”

“’Course it does,” said Adam. “Land or sea?”

“What?” said Wensleydale, who’d been distracted by all the liquids that seemed to be oozing from unexpected orifices in Brian’s face. They were all subject to regular colds, except Adam[1], but this was worrying even by the Them’s standards.

“Land,” said Adam patiently, “or sea.”

“Uh,” said Wensleydale.

“Land,” said Pepper. 

They looked at her.

“We c’n have it on my territory, because Asia’s biggest,” she went on. Her hands, they saw, were folded neatly in her lap.

“That’s set, then,” said Adam. 

The sun glowed on Pepper’s disintegrating braids. The quarry seemed very warm and small, after having touched the chilly edge of the sky, and the light was soft and buttery, except in the tangles of Pepper’s hair, where it developed the faintly overconfident quality of the shine you get on polished metal. 

They kept looking at her. Adam, blinking, raised a hand toward her tense face. 

[1] Who’d got colds on beautiful spring days where it’d be practic’ly inhuman, anyway, to keep a growin’ boy shut up in a classroom, back when there were classrooms, and who thought of thermometers as natural accomplices in crime.

 

The world changed. 

Again.

“Welcome to China,” Adam said, rather impressively, when the Them had uncurled from trembling fetal positions. “You can be here, and we’ll be in Russia, and the troops can meet in the middle, see?”

“Brilliant,” repeated Wensleydale, nervously. Beside him, Brian threw up. 

The vomit steamed away the instant it hit stone. They were standing on a part of the Great Wall that had never been open to tourists, and vomit would have ruined the view, but it still frightened Wensleydale to see the bile turn to vapour, just like that. 

Just like that, Adam touched two fingers to the center of his forehead. It hurt.

“Now,” he said, “just think of what kinds of soldiers you’d like, that’s all, and where you want them to go. They’ll do it.”

He turned to Brian, and Brian backed away, gasping. Adam didn’t seem to notice; he was examining the patch of ancient stone where the vomit had, very briefly, been. 

“You have to pull yourself together,” Pepper whispered to Brian. She took his elbow and shook him, which struck Wensleydale as astonishingly counterintuitive, even by Pepper’s standards; but it had the desired effect. Brian closed his mouth, at least, and wiped away the dribble on his chin.

Adam scuffed his trainer on the stone to no visible effect. Then he reached out and tapped Brian’s face, a little lower than he’d done it on Wensleydale because, among other things, Brian was nodding a bit.

“Now try,” said Adam. “Both of you.”

“’Scuse  _me_ ,” said Pepper, with magnificent iciness, “but it seems to me you’ve forgotten someone.”

Adam shook his head. “We can’t make ours until we’re up north. Otherwise how’ll we lay ambushes and have amazin’ tactical manoeuvres?”

“Well… all right,” said Pepper, reluctantly. “But it dun’t seem fair, that they get to start first.”

“Everyone gets a turn,” said Adam.

The Them nodded. That was how it worked. Everyone always got a turn. 

Only everyone hadn’t just been… them, up till now.

“Go on,” said Adam.

Wensleydale went to the parapet and leaned over. From there the treetops on the slope were a dense carpet of green. 

Feeling rather silly, he shut his eyes and pictured the same slope, but with soldiers in the trees, their helmets rising out of the branches like government-issued fruit.

He opened his eyes.

And gaped, a little.

“This is going to be  _brilliant_ ,” Adam said, at his back.

Out of the trees rose enormous… humanoid figures. They were slightly transparent, like the shower curtains at home[1], and they had solemn faces that might have come right out of a plastic mould, and they were sitting in the trees, like he’d imagined, only they were using the trees’ bushy crowns like bean bags, and Wensleydale didn’t even think that was possible, structurally speaking, but there they were.

“Coo,” said Brian.

“Wowie,” said Pepper.

Wensleydale wondered whether he was catching whatever Brian had.

One of the huge, helmeted heads turned toward him. The eyes were flat and as camouflaged as the rest of it, and Wensleydale flinched. He could see the raised seam on the side of the face, exactly where it would have been on a toy. They weren’t toys, though.

“You can shrink ‘em,” said Adam, carelessly. “If you like.”

Brian screwed up his nose in thought. The soldiers’ bodies disappeared downward, sinking into the sea of glittering leaves. 

The colour of them seemed to concentrate as they contracted, so that by the time it was just their shoulders and heads poking out, they looked almost solid. It wasn’t an improvement.

“What about guns?” Brian asked.

“They’ve got guns,” Pepper said, and it was true; they did have guns, sticking out of their backs. At least, there were tubes with triggers.

“Do they work, though, is the thing,” Brian said. “My uncle has a gun, an’ he said it was awfully complicated, an’ that using one well was like playing an instrument, an’ I was never very good at piano…”

“I was,” Wensleydale pointed out.

“Yeah, but you’ve got, well, glasses,” said Brian, a shade apologetically.

“I saw a film where the sharpshooter wore glasses, an’ he did just fine,” said Pepper. “Glasses probably help, I bet. I bet they make you even--”

“You won’t be using it,” Adam said, in a voice like scissors. He waved at the soldiers, and said, “ _They_  will.”

Apparently to punctuate his sentence, one stood on its branch and took aim at a spot a few inches from where Wensleydale’s fingers were curled over the rough outer edge of the parapet.

Wensleydale leapt back just in time to avoid being sprayed with ancient bits of stone.

“That’s a  _historic monument_ , that is,” he said accusingly, before he could stop himself.

“There’s not going to be any history anymore,” said Adam. “There’s just us." 

He glanced at the hole. "Anyway, I can fix it. I can make it better, if you want.”

Wensleydale opened his mouth, and closed it again.

“Nah,” said Brian, after a quiet minute. “It’s a good hole.”

Adam shrugged. He said, “It’s all the same to me.”

“Hey,  _Adam_ , shouldn’t we be in Russia? An’ planning our attack?” said Pepper, meaningfully.

“Sure,” said Adam, turning to her. He drew a doorway in the air between them with one finger, his arm describing impossibly straight lines. The doorway, finished, glistened faintly at the edges as if everything but it was made of glass.

Pepper swallowed and hopped through. Wensleydale found himself almost expecting a collision, but she was just gone. 

Adam went in from the other side.

“I didn’t know your uncle had a gun,” said Wensleydale, when the doorway had faded.

“Well, he did,” said Brian.

“Does,” Wensleydale corrected, automatically.

Brian gave him a furious look. “Did.”

“You don’t know that.”

Brian punched him. Not very hard, because he didn’t have the strength at the moment, but Wensleydale stumbled backwards and, when he had recovered himself, returned the sentiment with enthusiasm. There was a brief scuffle that ended when Brian began to sob.

“But it’s not  _real_ ,” he said. “Not reelly real. It’s all… all…”

“That’s right,” said Wensleydale, hopelessly. Somewhere along the way the headlock he’d had Brian in had turned into an awkward, one-armed embrace. He wasn’t sure how that had happened. It was, well, messy, and uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t have been so bad but for the talking.

“It’s just Adam,” said Brian, “bein’ Adam.”

Wensleydale didn’t answer. He was thinking.  _There’s just us_ , he thought.

Piled together against the parapet, they stared up at the hole.

[1] Although unlike the shower curtains they did not have a pattern of grinning ducks on them.

 

It is said that a tree falling where no one can hear does not make sound. Curiously, no one has spent much time on the question of whether a tree  _growing_  where no one can hear, does.

It was a moot point, in any case. There were plenty of listeners, in the forests that now covered most of Earth’s major and minor landmasses. Creatures that should have been long-extinct, who wore their ears on various no longer fashionable body parts, listened to the  _vroom_  of saplings unfurling with the same calm acceptance with which they were handling every part of their newly regained existences[1]; and species who’d lived there all their lives, who’d thought they’d understood the world, heard, too, and promptly began running around in a panic like chickens with their heads chopped off[3].

And there were also Aziraphale and Crowley, who arguably fell into both categories.

They’d unarguably fallen into creek, twice, but now they were walking along it in a state of perfect equilibrium. That is, Aziraphale was, and Crowley was blessing quietly and continuously as he tried to dry bits of himself off on passing clumps of grass without losing his grip on Aziraphale’s ankle.

“Stop that, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “you’re rather ticklish.”

“ _I’m_  ticklish?” said Crowley. “I’ll tell you what’s ticklish, those  _reeds_  were ticklish--”

“And you wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t tried to redirect my footsteps in defiance of my express wishes right at the bend,” said Aziraphale, “so do stop wriggling.”

“I’m not wriggling,” said Crowley. “Slithering, all right, undulating, maybe, but not wriggling.”

“Creeping?” suggested Aziraphale.

“I… suppose,” said Crowley, grudgingly.

“Stop creeping,” Aziraphale said pleasantly. 

Crowley hissed, and tightened his hold on the angel’s warm calf.

They continued along the bank. Crowley examined his midsection for signs of shedding: mud and reeds alone didn’t seem enough to explain this kind of itch, and he often began shedding early in times of pressure. And if this wasn’t a time of pressure, he didn’t know what was.

The angel’s toes started to squelch.

“So,” said Aziraphale, “this creek will meet up with a river, you say?”

“Yes,” said Crowley.

“We’re not, oh, I don’t know, walking in the opposite direction of what we should be, by any chance?”

“No,” said Crowley.

“Because I--”

He stopped talking, because then the canopy broke, and the light poured down. 

He also stopped moving, to avoid falling into water for the third time in an hour. Even as it was he had to flap a bit to regain his balance on the crumbling shore of the river.

“Oh,” he said.

“Yes,” said Crowley, with no little satisfaction.

“How nice,” said Aziraphale.

His wings unfolded from his bare back. It would have been impossible to tell that they were there before they were, well,  _there_ , but Crowley, who had experience in these matters, did catch the strange complex moment in which they pushed out of the dimension of wings and into this one.

He also caught a mouthful of feathers. It was just as well that he was wrapped so closely around the warm human flesh as to be cutting off circulation. From a purely practical perspective.

Aziraphale took off ungracefully, lurching out over the surface of the waters. 

Crowley, for his part, watched the ripples spread as they rose, and hung on. 

[1] Spending a few thousand years trapped in amber is a great way to get a new perspective on things and eliminate material concerns[2].

[2] Like mobility and the circulation of blood. 

[3] Except for the chickens who actually had had their heads chopped off: most of them had regrown in the past few hours, and as a result they were now serenely strolling around the squares where their barnyards had been before their barnyards were overgrown by nettles and flowers and trees.

 

Pepper stepped into snow and met Adam coming the other way.

“What bit of Russia’s this?” she asked suspiciously, jamming her hands in her pockets. It wasn’t actually cold, but it didn’t seem right, just standing there feeling nothing at all in that field of impossible white.

“Siberia,” said Adam. “That’s reelly Russian, that is.”

Pepper wrinkled her nose, but did not contest the statement. Knee-deep in a wintry wasteland, she felt, was not the time or the place for an argument with Adam Young.

“Do me like you did for Wensley an’ Brian,” she said instead, brushing her fringe out of the way. As an afterthought she rocked forwards, her toes sinking deep.

Adam looked distinctly unsettled by the sudden proximity of her forehead. He went very still.

“Hurry up,” said Pepper.

“Yeah, all right,” said Adam. He reached out. 

“Ouch!”

“It’s not supposed to hurt,” said Adam, soft and confused.

“Well it did,” Pepper snapped.

“It wasn’t--”

“It did.”

He stared at her. She crossed her arms.

“So what is it I can do now?”

“Make soldiers,” said Adam, and the voice in Pepper’s mind that had sung out when she had touched the sword laughed now, and said,  _I already could._

She ignored it.

“Huh,” she said. “Let’s do this, then.”

Adam beamed. They did it. There was a very small space of emptiness and light, and then they  _did_  it, men shooting up from the snow around them, row by splendid row. These ones, unlike Wensleydale’s and Brian’s, came up wearing white uniforms for camouflage; and when they sprouted, curving space around the suddenness of their presence, they looked like dragon’s teeth.

 

Near the southern border of Mongolia, a woman sat in the long grass of the steppe, raking her fingers aimlessly through cold dirt. She had on a rather nice suit and beside her a briefcase lay open. Occasionally a particularly low-blowing gust of wind tore a paper out of it, but neither the woman nor the briefcase seemed very concerned about this. Later that afternoon she was supposed to be helping set up an exciting new branch of her company that would have direct access to the budding markets of Mongolian tech-geeks, but this no longer appeared to be on her agenda, or on anyone’s.

There was nothing very interesting going through the woman’s head. Currently she was wondering vaguely whether she’d left the gas on[1]. She’d spent a while panicking, earlier, but ever since she’d convinced herself she was hallucinating she’d been very composed. She did wish she could remember why she was hallucinating twenty years after she’d sworn off her youthful dabbling in narcotics in favour of such safe, adult activities as week-long benders and not sleeping, but she figured she’d work that one out eventually. In the meantime, why worry?

She watched in polite bewilderment, therefore, as fifty-foot high men in combat gear loped across the plain, periodically ducking down as if the grass, which just barely went up to their bootlaces, would be anything like sufficient cover for their faintly translucent bulk.

Their bullets, though, were impressively realistic. So were their intestines.

The woman, consideringly, lay back and waited for them to go away.

Her name was Yoon Sun, and she did not have much significance in the grand scheme of things. In fact she did not have much significance in any smaller schemes; even her significance in her own personal scheme varied depending on the time of month and whether there was anything that sloshed pleasantly in glass bottles at hand. 

But she was not dead. And after a while, the soldiers went away.

In their wake came wind, the smell of imagined blood, and what Yoon Sun believed to be another woman. She was picking her way through the web of cracks in the earth left by one enormous shoe’s tread, her hair streaming out from her bent head like a flag. Yoon thought she was American; she looked very glamorous, even with goosebumps all down her long bronze legs and guts staining her boots.

When she came close enough for Yoon to hear what she was muttering, though, she spoke in an accent that Yoon recognised as English, because she had watched sitcoms with English people in them.

The part of Yoon’s brain that she did not use for watching sitcoms recognised that the woman spoke the dialect of danger, which comes in all pitches and volumes and has nothing to do with the rounding of vowels but which is, nevertheless, distinct.

Yoon found herself growing less enamored of the smart black of her specially tailored jacket, which stood out stark against the frost-pale leaves of grass. She tried to flatten down against the dry soil and resemble a rock. It didn’t work very well; the woman, as it turned out, had extremely sharp eyes[2]. Among other things.

“Hullo,” she said, crouching down beside Yoon. “I didn’t think there were many of you lot left.”

Yoon stared at the woman’s extremely sharp boots. She hadn’t understood more than a few of the words-- her command of English had never been good, even at the outset of her career, when she was still taking night classes for it. But she understood that she was not expected to make a contribution.

The woman then switched to fluent Korean.

“ _Where did they go?_ ”

Trembling, Yoon Sun pointed after the soldiers. She was horribly aware, as she did it, that she was still… not expected to make a contribution. That she was a curiosity, perhaps, and a signpost, and that was all.

“Thanks,” said the woman, low and husky. The hairs stood up on the back of Yoon’s neck.

The woman strolled off. 

Yoon stared after her. Then she rolled over onto her side, hugging herself. Her subconscious had nothing like that in it, she thought, very coherently, and smelled blood again: but realer, this time, and older, blood that had been spilled in sand long before there were calendars to mark the date of death.

She dragged her briefcase toward her. It was almost empty. She closed it against her chest, and held it there.

The soldiers would come back soon, she thought. And then she would leave, and look for-- look for--

She would look.

Yes.

[1] She had. But then, she’d also left her apartment complex still standing and her husband sleeping peacefully. Things change.

[2] It didn’t help that there are not all that many rocks out there that wear colourful ties and dangly earrings to show that yes, they are free-spirited, innovative individuals working creatively within the apparently rigid frame of the management structure.

 

War stepped into snow, and met Death, coming the other way.

“Hi,” she said.

He inclined his skull. YOU HAVE A LITTLE SOMETHING ON YOUR LIP, he said, tapping the corresponding area of bone on his own chin.

War made no move to wipe away the gore. “Toys,” she said, disdainfully. “They play with toys and call it  _Me_.”

THEY ARE NOT WRONG, said Death.

War’s lips curled, under clinging blood.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But I could have had the Hosts of Heaven and Hell doing my work. I could be rending the sky, right now, if it weren’t for that boy. And you!”

She paused, less for breath than drama.

I HELPED HIM. YES. I ALLOWED THIS TO PROCEED.

War’s head snapped up at that.

“And for what?” she demanded. “That’s what I’ve been trying to understand. What on Earth is in it for you, lord?”

She was looking somewhat the worse for wear, under the artistic application of viscera. Her lips were chapped and dark rings showed under her vivid eyes. Her arm swung jerkily at her side as she talked: its movements had an amputated quality to them.

“No mortals,” she said, as if counting off a mental list. “No--”

YES, THERE ARE, said Death. Things glittered in his sockets that might have been stars, or, then again, might not have.

War looked away.

“Pollution’s gone, then?” she said, brittle as cheap steel. “I thought so.”

WELL SPOTTED, said Death. His grin was not unkind. It glistened, the same clean white the snow was, all around.

“All right,” she said. “All right. But the humans.”

ARE NOT HERE. THAT IS ALL. EVEN HIS POWER HAS AN END.

“ _Here_ , though.”

Death tilted his scythe at waist-level, idly. In the metal, War could make out a piece of a sky reflected from some other hour or place. It had clouds in it, and promises.

HE MISSED A FEW, he said, shrugging.

“Yes, I noticed. But the rest?” said War, impatiently. “You can’t get to the rest.”

THAT IS NOT, said Death, MY PRIMARY CONCERN.

“Then what is?”

I DO THE JOB THAT IS IN FRONT OF ME.

“What’s that, old chap,” sneered War, and for as long as it takes for a shell to burst, recaptured her old unnatural loveliness. “Me?”

I THOUGHT I MIGHT MAKE A SNOWMAN, said Death, mildly.

There was a silence.

War began to laugh. 

Laughing, she bent down, and picked up a handful of snow, which blushed in her palm like Pepper caught in the act of flipping through a new issue of  _Seventeen_. Death watched with interest and concern as she hefted the lump.

“I have a better idea,” she said, with her back still to him; and then a sphere of bloody snow was hurtling towards his nose holes.

OH, B--

 

“ _\--ugger_ ,” said Aziraphale, wheeling right just in time to avoid being decapitated by an oversized shuriken.

“I miss the cannonballs,” said Crowley, contemplatively.

It was noon. Objects had been hurtling past them from somewhere east of Europe for about twenty minutes now, and in that brief time the boy-- because who else would it be, after all-- had cycled through most of the major styles of weaponised projectile that had ever been favoured by a human civilisation in all of history, and several that hadn’t been favoured by any[1].

“I miss not having my wings out,” said Aziraphale. “They make me a much larger target.”

“Some angel you are,” said Crowley. His heart wasn’t in it. He was busy keeping an eye out for UFOs.

“Sorry? Did I just hear you say you’d like to fly on your own a bit?” said Aziraphale.

“Don’t get your feathers in a twist,” said Crowley. “I was only joking.”

“You and your jokes,” said Aziraphale.

“Yes, well. I’m a bit tense. It’s this body. It’s afraid of dying. Also, heights.”

Aziraphale gave him an incredulous look.

“It is!” said Crowley defensively. “Snakes aren’t naturally airborne creatures[2], you know.”

“Some demon you are,” said Aziraphale.

“A body is a body,” Crowley snapped. “You of all people ought to know that.”

Aziraphale was briefly distracted by the need to dodge a stray katana.

“Oh come  _on_ ,” Crowley shouted at Russia, with the reckless abandon and wild courage that comes with knowing one is safely out of earshot, “that’s not even aerodynamically feasible!”

“Neither are bees,” Aziraphale observed.

“What?”

“Bees,” said Aziraphale. “They’re not aerodynamically feasible. I never liked them. Gabriel said they demonstrated the power of faith,” he added, inconsequentially.

“What didn’t Gabriel say that about, though?”

“Demons,” said Aziraphale, promptly, and went on, before Crowley could respond: “It’s true, I suppose, about bodies. Mine’s exhausted.”

Crowley rolled his eyes. There was no way Aziraphale could have seen this, under the circumstances, but he detected it regardless, the stubborn git.

“Not from flying,” he said sharply. “From being in this world. With him in it. He doesn’t want humans here.”

“He hasn’t got humans here,” Crowley objected.

“Not many,” said Aziraphale. The light poured off his wings like white smoke.

“And that’s not a proper human body, is it,” said Crowley.

“I don’t know about that,” said Aziraphale. “After all, my dear, the wings are just a metaphor.”

“Please don’t say things like that,” Crowley groaned, “or I might just squeeze your foot off.”

“A substantial, airworthy metaphor,” Aziraphale corrected himself.

“Not. Helping.”

Aziraphale covered his smile with his hand. And was almost knocked out of the sky by a small meteor.

“We’re landing,” he told Crowley, when he’d recovered.

“Great,” said Crowley, somewhat indistinctly; his nose was jammed up against the back of Aziraphale’s knee, because anything was better than watching the horizon swing this way and that like the sword of an amateur fencer practising alone, in his room, late at night, with a frilly shirt on[4].

Aziraphale asked, “My dear fellow, would you say we’ve gone far enough south for that suspicious bulge in the canopy to be London?”

Crowley risked an eyeful. It was, indeed, a suspicious bulge. He quite approved, on general principles: the island looked rather like a snake itself, green-scaled and sinuous and busily digesting something small and furry.

“…yes, actually,” he said. “There’s the Tower, see?” He poked his tail at the visible turret.

“So it is,” said Aziraphale. He frowned. “But there are lots of buildings taller than the Tower in London, and I don’t see any of them showing…”

“Perhaps he didn’t find those so interesting,” suggested Crowley.

Aziraphale shivered.

“Perhaps,” he said, angling his wings to the left and down.

[1] The flaming chicken, the ludicrously oversized baseball, Wensleydale, etc.

[2] And didn’t like it when they were unnaturally airborne either, as Crowley had discovered in Mexico circa 400 BC, while orchestrating the rise[3] of the false idol Quetzalcoatl.

[3] All the way through the temple roof, at which point he was distracted by the need to shut up Aziraphale, who’d been sniggering helplessly in a corner.

[4] Or worse, none at all.

 

The light dappled Anathema’s upper back and arms. Divided up by green shade, standing utterly still, she looked less like a quite possibly insane young woman and more like a collection of parts that belonged precisely where they were. The short bright hairs on her long forearm; the deeper well of shadow where her cheek was lowered against her shoulder for sighting-- they seemed to have blossomed out of the damp wood.

Even the gleam of the barrel could easily have been the twinkle in the eye of some lurking carnivore, Newt considered.

The illusion fell apart when she pulled the trigger, though. Moving, her body separated from its backdrop.

“I think I hit it,” she said, peering into the vines. “Can you go--?”

“Thanks,” said Newt, but he went.

The makeshift target[1] was indeed lying there, heaped ungracefully on mossy stones. It flopped sadly in his hands.

“Well done,” he said, returning. “We’ll eat tonight.”

“Yes,” said Anathema. “Mushrooms.” 

Newt sagged. She took pity on him, and also the target. The target she held up to the light, to no immediately obvious effect.

She moved it a little to the left. 

Nothing.

She moved it a little to the right.

Newt examined his watch. It wasn’t working, but this, at least, was a familiar phenomenon.

Anathema was about to try flipping the doll over when, at last, gold flared through the round hole in its twiggy center, as it was at last brought into alignment with a shaft of sun.

Newt clapped, dutifully. Anathema gave him his jacket back.

[1] Newt’s jacket, filled with twigs: this sophisticated mannequin’s structural integrity secured by one (1) Witchfinder Private’s regulation pin.

 

How to describe the First Battle, which raged through lunchtime and out the other side without interruption by parent, teacher, or aged aunt? Which, accordingly, altered the coastlines of several major continents, and opened up new bays and capes at the edges of the minds of the Them, where the power poured in?

Adam’s mind, now more open to power than a minimalist kind of archipelago is to sea, considered this pressing question as he pedalled back towards Tadfield.

His wheels squeaked quietly over the choppy waves of the North Sea.

_Clackclackclackclack_ , went Pepper’s bike beside him. A mile or so off, the smudged figures of Brian and Wensleydale were discernable, racing along parallel currents. 

“What happened to Dog?” Pepper said.

“Oh,” said Adam, “he’s havin’ adventures in Australia, an’ such.”

Pepper leaned low over her handlebars and pedalled harder. The ocean blurred past at the same rate no matter what gear she was in, or how hard she braked, but she did it anyway.

“We could call it the Battle of Mongolia Bowl,” Adam speculated.

“Mongolia’s not a bowl.”

“But it’s barely one, so if we nipped back quick--”

“’s not much of a name,” said Pepper, hastily.

Adam’s brows drew together.

“We could call it the Battle of the Amazin’ly Clever ‘Munition,” he said.

“We could,” said Pepper, witheringly.

“Well, what do you want to call it, then,” Adam said, with a flicker of irritation.

“I don’t see why we’ve got to call it anything,” said Pepper. “We never used to.”

“Yes,” said Adam, “but this time we won.”

Pepper rode up the slope of a breaker and off the crest, carving a faceted furrow of green into the blue.

“We could call it the One We Won,” she said sarcastically.

“But we’re going to win all of them, so that doesn’t work,” said Adam, seriously. He turned eyes on her that glowed like mirrors.

Pepper closed her eyes. Fast-flying foam needled the lids.

“What,  _all_  of them?” she said.

“Of course, all of ‘em,” said Adam. “We’re better.”

“Oh,” said Pepper, exhaling. “Right.”

“And if they look like they’re winning I’ll just make us a whole ‘nother army or two,” said Adam, in what he probably thought was a reassuring manner. He smiled at her.

Pepper thought, in rapid succession:  _Poor Brian. Poor Wensley._

_Better them than me._

 

St. James’ Park, at least, was almost its old self, minus the tourists and, for some reason, the ducks.

Aziraphale gazed disconsolately at the calm pond. 

“Cheer up,” said Crowley, “they’re probably migrating.”

“Where to, exactly?”

“Funny you should say that,” said Crowley. “I was just about to ask the same question. Only about, you know, us. Not that this wasn’t a nice landing spot, but it doesn’t have much in the way of refreshments.”

“Does alcohol even have an effect on you in that form?” said Aziraphale. He sounded fascinated.

“It will if it knows what’s good for it,” Crowley said darkly.

Aziraphale nodded.

“My shop, then,” he said.

Crowley’s head snapped up. He’d been peering hopefully into the still depths of the water, but some issues were evidently more pressing than the possibility of fish.

“Um,” he said. “About that.”

Aziraphale listened.

“And you didn’t tell me this before… because?” he asked, when Crowley had finished explaining[1].

“I thought you knew,” Crowley said, wretchedly. “Besides, I had other things on my mind. My car exploded.”

Aziraphale covered his eyes. After a moment, his wings collapsed soundlessly into his shoulders. He sat like that, human even with regard to his metaphors, naked and unseeing, for quite some while.

“So,” said Crowley. “My place?”

“Certainly,” said Aziraphale, his eyes opening, behind the cage of his fingers. 

He dropped his hand, and glanced down at his knees as if seeing them for the first time. With a snap, he materialised a suit. It was tweed. Crowley pulled back as far as was possible while leaving most of his body piled in a comfortable pyramid of loops, but the next thing he knew, Aziraphale was scooping him into his pocket.

“I’ll shed,” threatened Crowley. “Tweed always makes me peel, it made me peel when I was  _human_ , I’m going to shed like  _anything_  and you’ll be sorry you--”

“My dear,” said Aziraphale, “I don’t give a damn.”

“So you did watch that movie,” said Crowley, diverted briefly. “I always thought so.”

“I read the book,” Aziraphale replied.

“Hah,” said Crowley, “you did not, even you don’t have the stomach--”

They crossed the lawn and went down into what had once been a street, talking. And a human bystander, after overcoming their shock at seeing a man holding a conversation with the snake in his pocket[2], might have observed that it had the feel of an old and comfortable difference of opinion, draped over a new, shared uncertainty like a worn hunting jacket put on for the express purpose of concealing the new shirt that one’s wife bought one and told one in no uncertain terms one would be wearing, and also, it’s salmon, dear, not pink, so do stop fussing.

There were no such bystanders. Aziraphale and Crowley moved on, talking, into the twilight of the trees.

[1] Through an eloquent combination of words, gestures, embarrassed hissing, and what might or might not have been a brief snatch of interpretive dance.

[2] Or, depending on the observer, after leaping to the conclusion that the snake was a communications device by which the man was contacting the KGB headquarters and trying to convince a passing copper of the same.

 

And Tadfield was itself, minus everything.

Adam led her on foot down the road; they’d left their bikes at the quarry. “Who’s hungry?” he’d said to them, when they were gathered around the milk crate, and Brian’d shook his head and clutched his belly in mute protest, and Wensleydale’d stared at his shiny shoes and muttered, “I’m fine, thanks,” and Pepper-- Pepper had admitted that yes; yes she was. It had been a long time since lunch the day before.

So it was just them.

“There,” said Adam, near the end of the row, where there was a walled garden that had once belonged to Mr. R. P. Tyler and now, Pepper supposed, belonged to Adam.

They climbed the wall together. Halfway up, Adam started to scrabble, and Pepper helped him find purchase in the mortar. His wrist pushed bony into her palm. 

When they got to the top, he said, “Apples,” with the flourish of a conjuror.

“I have got eyes, you know,” retorted Pepper, shortly. The tree was weighed down with unripe fruit: its limbs curved so far that her hair was at risk of getting tangled in the splay of twigs at the end of one.

Adam tore the apple hanging from where the twigs forked. It sat in the hollow of his hand, small and green and shining.

“D’you want to cut it?” he asked.

Pepper looked blank.

“With your sword,” Adam clarified, patiently.

“It’s at the quarry,” she said.

He drew it out of the rough stone beside him, and passed it to her. He set the apple spinning in the thin air.

She lifted the sword above her head, and brought it down with a snick through the apple's stem and then through the apple. When the cut was made a white seam of juice welled up on the smooth skin. But the halves did not part.

“Which side would you like?” said Adam.

Pepper heard him as if from a distance. She hesitated.

It had been a  _long_  time since lunch the day before, though. So she took the one nearest her, and bit down. 

It was very sour and very cold and it tasted like the promise of winter. Juice trickling down her chin, she ate it all, even the core. 

When she looked up Adam was still chewing on the edge of his half in a leisurely way and she had to fight the urge to tear it out of his mouth. 

Instead, she stretched out her right arm, and lopped off the whole branch.

"You can put the sword back now," she said.

Adam looked shocked. "Oh, no," he said. "What d'you want to go and do that for? You can't go putting swords back. That never happens in stories. That ol' king di'n't put his sword back in the stone, did he?""

Pepper broke the stem of a second fruit. "This a story?"

"The best one ever," said Adam.

Pepper nodded, once, and chewed. She’d finished off another three by the time he was licking his fingers of the pulpy remains of the first.

“That was good,” he said. Light flashed in the curve of his wet lower lip when his mouth moved. It made the skin around it look fragile and heavy, all at once.

“Yeah,” said Pepper. “We ought to bring some back for Brian and Wensley, just in case they--”

“Don’t you worry,” said Adam. “They had their chance.”

Pepper said, slowly:

“Yes.”

She ate the last apple attached to the branch she’d cut off. It was good, and she felt obscurely ashamed to know it. But she didn’t stop.

 

“Here we are,” Crowley said, in the middle of Aziraphale’s detailed refutation of Crowley’s theory that Aziraphale had watched the entirety of Gone with the Wind during the two years that he, Crowley, spent bringing about Starbucks, and probably cried, too.

Aziraphale glanced at the riot[1] of vegetable matter surrounding them and said, “How can you tell?”

But in fact the building containing Crowley’s flat was in far better condition than any of its neighboring structures; the rainforest had given it a berth of several feet all around, especially at the upper level, and so whole patches of the front were clear and visible, including one with the address plate on it.

It was Aziraphale who spotted the reason.

“Oh,” he said, laughing, “oh, goodness.”

“What?” said Crowley, annoyed. “What is it?”

Aziraphale bent over, putting his hands on his knees. “Your houseplants,” he gasped, eventually.

Crowley slipped out of his pocket and out to Aziraphale’s wrist. Then he shinned up Aziraphale’s sleeve to the stiff cloth of the coat’s shoulder, where he could get a better look.

“Gosh,” he said.

“Quite,” said Aziraphale, wiping his eyes.

It was, indeed, Crowley’s houseplants. In his absence they’d burst out of their pots, and out of their sills, and out of the glass panes for good measure. They spilled, now, from the windows and from wide cracks in the walls, trailing down over the slick paint in waterfalls of green.

And they were, he saw, with affection welling undeniably in his twisted and demonic heart, scaring off the encroaching wildlife through such low and underhanded tactics as mimicking the behavior of mistletoe.

“Well,” said Aziraphale, “I suppose I should apologise for ever having mocked your choice of hobbies, my boy. This is really rather marvelous.”

“I know,” said Crowley, gleefully. It was just as well that he didn’t have tear ducts, or he’d have embarrassed them both. "The little monsters did me proud."

"That's one word for it," murmured Aziraphale, touching the door. It opened smoothly for him, despite the ivy that was tangled up in its hinges.

"One word? It's the--"

But the angel wasn't paying attention. “Hallo?” he called, and then seemed to realise what he'd said. He winced.

“No,” said Crowley, more subduedly, “there wouldn’t be anyone. The old lady downstairs got in Hastur’s way, and besides…”

Aziraphale’s mouth tightened. Crowley, who was busy tucking himself under the starched collar of his shirt for security, pretended not to notice.

He did notice, however, that when inside the angel climbed the stairs in rather a hurry. He didn’t fumble for a light switch until he was in Crowley’s living room, and then it was to no noticeable effect.

“Let there be light,” Aziraphale said. Crowley wished he hadn’t; it meant Crowley could see how his newly manifested shoes left smudges of rich red mud on the carpet, and also the rich red smear that had been Ligur, not very long ago[2]. On the other hand, it did make locating the drinks cabinet[3] go a little faster.

“Here we are,” said Aziraphale, pouring them each a glass. He set the cups down on the coffee table and added several bottles, for good measure, pulled from the back of the shelf.

“I was saving those,” commented Crowley.

“Yes?” said Aziraphale. “You did a good job. They seem thoroughly saved to me. And I would know.”

His eyes twinkled horribly. 

Crowley hissed, and hauled himself up over the rim of the tumbler, and submerged his head whole into the wine. At first try it tasted extremely unpleasant. But he concentrated, and was rewarded, not much later, by the world beginning to blur pleasantly at the edges. Though that might have been the oxygen deprivation, he conceded, when he had pulled out again and was lying on his side in a pool of red liquid, panting.

He heard the clink as Aziraphale set the saucer down on the tabletop, and the slosh as Aziraphale emptied his glass into it. He rolled a little, as is easy to do, when you are a relatively light tube lying on a greased surface.

“I hate you,” he said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Aziraphale placidly. “We’re in this together, after all.”

Crowley hissed, long and low.

Then he inched a little closer to the saucer.

[1] Unless it was a fracas. It can be hard to tell, with vegetable matter.

[2] Which was ringed all round by fat roots. It was... probably quite nutritious, Crowley decided, after he'd had a good shudder.

[3] It was buried behind the lattice of tendrils that had once been Crowley's prize  _Sansevieria trifasciata_ , and took some locating. 

 

Mushrooms, Newt was discovering, were a serious business.

He’d finally dug up a likely-looking little cluster of flat caps that reminded him of one of his more successful circuit boards[1], which he thought might be a good omen, and he was getting ready to collect them when Anathema, padding up to look over his shoulder, snapped, “Not those,” and yanked him to his feet.

“You said to look for big flat orange ones!” Newt protested.

“With forking gills,” said Anathema, flatly.

“I thought you were joking about that bit,” said Newt, lamely.

She frowned. “I wouldn’t joke about that kind of thing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I,” Newt snapped. “I mean, we’ve known each other for how long? Two days?”

“That’s a day longer than I ever thought we would,” said Anathema, coolly.

Newt found he didn't have any retort to this.

“So, uh,” he asked, after an awkward pause, “what would have happened to me if I’d sampled those… unforkingly gilled ones?”

Anathema shrugged. “Nothing irreversible. But we’d probably have to have found you a new pair of trousers.”

“Oh,” said Newt. He decided not to ask what constituted ‘irreversible’; he suspected he knew. “Er. Thanks for saving my trousers.”

“Any time,” said Anathema.

Newt swallowed hard.

Hitching up her skirt, Anathema stepped neatly over the offending fungi and ushered him gently around. “This way. I found a good patch-- that was why I came to get you in the first place.”

It was a patch, all right. He couldn’t see any gills, but he trusted her.

“I trust you,” he said.

“Chanterelles aren’t very good raw,” she said, sounding faintly apologetic. “Making a fire seems like a bad plan, though.”

“I’m sure they’ll be delicious,” he told her, and was amazed to find that he meant it. His mother had thought his stomach was too sensitive for mushrooms, especially ones with French names, once, but that had been another life.

Anathema’s lips quirked. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and then suddenly her clever fingers were undoing the fastenings of his jacket.

Newt gaped at her.

“I need something to hold them in,” she said briskly.

“Right, right,” he said. “Of course. Right. You do that.”

She slid the jacket off, and did that.

“Should I, uh--”

“No,” she said, snapping a stalk. “Just don’t go anywhere.”

“Right,” said Newt.

He watched his jacket fill with gold.

“I, uh… I’m glad we got another day,” he said.

“Yes,” said Anathema, matter-of-factly. 

Newt was almost ready to elaborate when she added, “I just wish I knew why.”

“Maybe it’s not… as bad as all that,” he said, and cringed at the look she gave him. “I’m just saying, I haven’t actually seen anything that suggested the world was, you know. Ended. Maybe we just… witnessed the first ever case of spontaneous reforestation, or something. You don’t know.”

Anathema’s hands stilled for a moment.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. She did not look up. The side of her face was pale under the wing of her dark hair.

“Beautiful,” Newt agreed.

“I do know,” she said. She looked at him, and her green eyes were dry and bright. “It’s my business to know.”

She resumed gathering mushrooms, a little violently.

“Besides,” she said, “what exactly do you think happened to all the people? I felt it. I felt them go.”

Newt’s jaw worked.

“Listen,” he said, “all I’m saying is, maybe Agnes got some things wrong.”

Anathema unbent.

“Have a mushroom,” she said, sticking the sagging jacket and its bright load under his nose.

Nervously, he had one.

“It’s very… unusual,” he said at last.

“Agnes got everything right, up to a point,” said Anathema, ignoring this. “And she stopped there for a reason.”

“You’re not a descendent anymore,” said Newt. He felt like someone else was talking with his voice, but he believed what he was saying, which was what counted, he thought.

“You’re right there,” said Anathema. She gave a short laugh, and opened her purse, which had had index cards in it, and now held something else entirely.

Newt helped himself to another mushroom.

“So if all that target practice wasn’t to bring down wild deer,” he began, eyeing the glint of gunmetal in the open purse, “what…?”

“The Antichrist might still be out there,” said Anathema. “I have to be more prepared, now. That’s what not descending  _means_.”

“Right,” said Newt. It was a good word, Right. It didn’t give anything away.

[1] That is, a circuit board belonging to that select subset of his creations which did not cause major property damage.

 

“You can go an’ explore your territory now,” Adam announced, generously, when he and Pepper returned. “I expect you’ll want to set up your base proper.”

Wensleydale looked at Pepper. She was dripping with juice, and she wore an unnameable expression. She mouthed: Sorry, and he felt cold, sitting in his ray of sunlight with Brian resting warmly against his shoulder, and he looked away again.

“What about you?” said Brian. “What’ll you do?”

“Oh,” said Adam, “I’ve got to think a bit. Got to plan. It’s not easy, you know, arrangin’ everything just so.”

He smiled encouragingly at them. “You all go,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me.”

He waited.

“You’ve got to send us, I think,” said Wensleydale.

Adam looked thoughtfully at a spot on the solid chalk cliff behind the gathered Them. He clapped his hands, and it was just the cliff. He clapped them again, and now there was a hole in the cliff that had always been there. 

Dog came scrambling through, his tail wagging like the planchette on a schizophrenic Ouija board. He leapt up on Adam and began licking everything he could reach.

Adam extricated himself with some difficulty, laughing. “ _Good_  Dog,” he said. He patted the matted fur, and kissed the wet nose, and scratched the ear that was right side out. “You like Australia, I bet.”

Dog, who’d only just escaped the maw of a jellyfish[1] and was therefore feeling as benign as is possible for a hellhound, decided not to disabuse his master of the notion.

Not that he could have, anyway. Adam believed what he liked.

He burrowed further into Adam’s arms. For a few minutes, there was just a boy and his dog, rolling happily around in the dusty bottom of the quarry. Adam’s eyes were screwed up in laughter; his face had gone red from a thorough bathing by a rough beast’s tongue. There was dust smudging his t-shirt. 

It could have been last Thursday. It could have been Sunday somewhere else, far away.

It wasn’t. The minutes passed, and Adam said, sternly, “All right, that’s enough. I can’t spoil you, you know. I’ve got to keep up your training.”

Dog whined.

Adam carried him back to the hole, and crouched down. Dog began to squirm, to no avail.

“ _Run_ ,” Adam whispered.

Dog gave up. He ran.

“Good boy,” Adam shouted after him.

Then he gave chase. 

[1] Jellyfish do not have maws, but what the ones common in Australia do have is worse. In any case, semantic precision was low on Dog’s list of concerns[2].

[2] Something of an accomplishment, this, given how short Dog’s list of concerns was.

 

This time it really was cold, arriving. But whatever he’d done to her meant she could make more things than just soldiers, so instead Pepper made the fur coat her grandmother wore to church and the theatre, which smelled of lavender water and her grandmother’s favourite cigarettes. It took her a while, the smell, but she sort of thought it was worth it, being wrapped up in its soft stinking folds.

She tramped south, for want of any better options. There was an awful lot of Russia. She had exploring to do. 

It was hard, though, to enjoy the crunch of snow underfoot, like the crunch of apples, with Wensleydale staring at her whenever she closed her eyes.

“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper said, aloud, into the wind.

“An interesting observation,” said War, moving out of Pepper’s peripheral vision in a sudden blossoming of red. “I quite agree.”

Without thinking, Pepper reached for the sword. 

This wasn’t as effective a gesture as it might have been, because she’d jammed the sword through a belt loop and it was, accordingly, rendered inaccessible by a thick layer of fur between her hand and it. But the woman flinched anyway. It was good to see her flinch.

“There was no call for that,” War said, her hands raised, her eyes tightly shut. “I just want to talk.”

Her knuckles were red from frostbite. “Okay,” said Pepper, curiosity outweighing remembered rage. “Talk.”

War’s eyes opened. She attempted a smile, through peeling lipstick.

“Really,” she said, “I just wanted to look.”

Pepper folded her arms. “You’re looking right now, aren‘t you?”

War came closer.

“You’re not really what I would have expected,” she remarked.

“Don’t tell me you expected this,” Pepper said, scornfully. 

War’s eyes were a rather ordinary pale brown, by then. But they glimmered like the campfires of an army.

“Not this,” she said, “no. I didn’t think I’d be replaced at all. But if I had, I would have thought it’d be by someone…”

Pepper glared at her.

“…someone  _strong_ ,” said War, more distantly. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pepper demanded. “I’m stronger’n you. You let go first.”

War grimaced, as if she’d bitten into something that disagreed with her.

“Yes, yes,” she said, “you took that sword, all right. But who made me let go? You, or that boy?”

Pepper said nothing.

War looked triumphant. “Just so. You’re, what-- ten?”

“Eleven,” said Pepper.

“Eleven, then. You’re not strong, little girl. You have a strong leader, but you’re just a human who knows how to go with the flow. You’ve someone

else’s idea burning a hole in your head and a weapon you don’t know how to use. That’s not strength,” said War. “I know about strength.”

Pepper pulled the sword out through the coat, which disintegrated. It was only something she’d made, she thought, feeling the wind blow in where the fur had been. The smell’d not even lasted past the first ten minutes.

“You sure of that?” she asked.

“ _Very_  good,” said War, sounding delighted even as she stepped back. “You’re adorable.”

“I am  _not_ ,” Pepper shouted, and lunged. 

War leapt out of the way.

“You might even grow up to be quite something. If you grow up, that is,” she continued, as if to herself. “I can almost understand why the boy wants you. He’s young, after all. And there’s the hair.”

“Don’t talk about Adam like that,” Pepper snarled. 

She slashed desperately at War’s mad grin, but War was dancing, now, like a man waving a banner before a bull.

“Does he still go by that name?” she inquired. She sounded amused. “What a charming affectation.”

“’S’not an affectation,” Pepper said. “It’s his name.”

The sword guided her arms to the left, and snapped around at the last possible second to slice upwards. War hissed between clenched teeth, and almost lost her balance, but still there was no contact.

Pepper screamed her frustration. War rolled her eyes.

“ _Humans_ ,” she said. “The ones who only think they’re human are the worst of all. Like lemmings, you are.”

The sword’s tip lowered.

Pepper took a few deep breaths. War breathed, too, short and eager, and only her exhalation hung pale in the air.

“Maybe I’m just followin’,” Pepper said. “Like you said. But you were, too, back at the airbase. And that means,” she said, with growing assurance, “that means my leader’s stronger’n yours.”

She raised the sword again, and brought it around in a broad arc of white.

At least, that was what she meant to do, and very impressive it would probably have looked. Unfortunately, the nature of the move was such that it left her side wide open, and War took the opportunity to tackle her.

They went down in a tangle of limbs and orange hair. War had longer both; she ended up pinning Pepper face-down in the snow. Pepper sank, and--

\--then there was the burn of the snow through her wet clothes and the burn of War’s skin through her fashionable couture. And Pepper heard the blood pounding in her ears like the scrape of a rough cloth on a blade; and she felt like a sword being heated for the forge. 

She didn’t know that was what she felt like, of course; she registered heat, and pressure beyond what could be explained away by physics, not from War but from something inside her; and that was all. But she did.

She said, intelligently:

“Mmf.”

“You’re unfortunately correct,” War whispered. “Your leader is stronger than mine. But you’ll notice that I’m alone, now. My leader is pretending to be a snowman somewhere out there--”

Pepper contemplated this mental image, and then, very deliberately, stopped contemplating it.

“--and I’m here.”

Her grip on Pepper’s shoulder tightened. 

“Do you see? Do you see, little girl?”

“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper repeated.

She fumbled, blindly, for what she had let go of when she was falling.

“Yes. But you can make your own bloody side,” War said, softly. “You can at least do that.”

She stood up just as Pepper closed her fingers around the handle, and ran for it.

Pepper rolled up into a sitting position. She watched her go. The sword’s hilt tugged at her hand, but that was all right; she’d had a little sister, once, and she’d learned how to resist tugging[1].

She sat in the snow for what felt like a hundred years. The sun did not move, in the blue dome of the sky.

[1] Even if she was more used to it being a tug in the direction of ice cream, rather than, say, gruesome retribution for words like knives that'd been under the skin.

 

Two saucers later, Crowley was in something of a knot.

Aziraphale mumbled, “Do you need a hand?”

“I think I need more than one,” said Crowley.

“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Sorry, can’t help you there.” 

He drained his wineglass. Crowley glared.

“That reminds me,” he went on, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “I meant to ask you-- why is it that you can’t transform?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Crowley. “But I suspect it’s Hastur’s idea of a good joke, sending the human-lover back to earth legless. Permanently.”

“Ah,” said Aziraphale.

He rolled up his trouser cuff to examine his ankle.

“You left bruises,” he said, after a while.

“Yes?” said Crowley. “You threatened to kick me off.”

“Hmmm,” said Aziraphale, noncommittally. He waved a hand over the bruises. Nothing happened.

“I do believe you’re not the only one whose superiors have developed a sense of humor,” he said.

“Took them long enough,” Crowley said.

“I could have stood for it to take them a little longer,” said Aziraphale. He unrolled the cuff, and slumped back on the white leather of the sofa. 

Crowley began to untie his tail. Very carefully.

“So, what,” he said, after a while. “You think we’ve just got… these bodies? One chance? We screw up, and it’s back to the…”

“Cutting board,” said the angel helpfully.

Crowley winced. “Yeah. That.”

Aziraphale swirled his wine around a little. It turned clear. He had an experimental sip, and smiled in a manner that suggested to Crowley that whatever he’d miracled it into, it wasn’t water.

“So it seems,” he said.

Crowley flickered his tongue along the rim of the saucer, catching spots he’d missed.

“We’ll just have to be careful, then,” he said, brightly.

“Do you think the… atmospheric activity has died down?” Aziraphale asked.

Crowley looked at the level of the remaining wine in the bottles. 

“Nah,” he said. “Not just yet, I shouldn’t think.”

 

There was a tree in the rainforest that rose above the rest. 

Jaime Hernez would have liked to have his lunch under it. He was quite hungry, and he was getting a little worried, up there on his branch. It was a good branch-- a big flattish one with sunlight filtering down to it through the broad leaves-- but it was some way away from his children, and the ground. His children would be very afraid of the trees, he thought, and he drew the liana taut between his hands as he thought it.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there. Sometimes it seemed as if no time at all had passed since the rain had stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. Sometimes it seemed as if it had been a hundred years of sitting and trying not to see how far the canopy extended in every direction.

In any case he was high up, and safe from the growling things, and sometimes it was difficult not to laugh.

The hunger made it easier, though. It was a pain in his middle, and it made him uncomfortably conscious of how out of place his body was, with its edges rubbing wrong against the air and the wood and the light, and its insides warring among themselves.

It got very bad just around when his lunch break would have been if he’d still had his job, or if his job had still been there to have. He clung to the branch and tried not to fall off, and he said to the tree, “Please,” and he felt the tree move. He had never in all his life known a tree like this one for moving.

The strange thing was--

There were so many strange things that he started laughing again at the thought. But the thing that seemed strange to him was that the tree, rather than closing up over him, brought its boughs closer together under him, so as to shield him from the dark below.

It was not exactly enough. But he kept his grip, and the tree was very solid, even through the loneliness of the pain. And after a while the hunger faded again.

He heard something that might have been footsteps, moving off. He shrugged.

“Thanks,” he said to the tree.

It rustled smugly.

So much for leaving, he thought. But then-- a little longer with green all around, that couldn’t hurt.

 

The boy was conjuring a tea set when Famine finally tracked him down in a flat dry place that had been called many things, including Arizona.

He had a napkin tucked into his shirt, and he was sitting cross-legged on a flat dry rock in front of a hunk of wood draped with stiff white cloth. The scales squatted in the middle. Around it, cutlery sprang up in rows, and there was china, too, forming from firmament.

But no food. Famine smiled.

“How’s it going, if I may ask?” he said.

Wensleydale looked up from behind fogged glasses.

“Oh,” he said, drearily. “You.”

This wasn’t quite the reception Famine had been hoping for, but he ploughed on.

“I’m here to make you an offer,” he said, looking the boy firmly in the lens, since the eye was obscured. “I think it’ll be of interest to you.”

Wensleydale said, “Then make it.”

Famine cast a longing glance at the scales and said, “You’re a smart boy. I can tell. So you probably know that what happened last night was… not what was scheduled to happen, hm?”

Wensleydale folded his arms. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “Adam scheduled it. Not very long beforehand, but he did.”

Famine developed the blank expression common to professionally genial adults upon encountering Wensleydale for the first time.

“It was not,” he said, “written.”

“Maybe not yet,” said Wensleydale. “Adam’s a great one for writin’ books, though. He wrote one about a pirate who was also a detective.”

Famine picked up a fork and fingered it.

“What I’m trying to say is… you can put things right,” he said, eventually, as if repeating words he had heard spoken many times but never before uttered himself.

Wensleydale stood up. He was not a tall boy, but the sun glinted on his glasses like a witty retort.

“Seems to me,” he said, “this is as right as anything.”

“You don’t believe that,” said Famine, and his face went hollow when he spoke, gaining strange depths under the skin.

“Who says?” Wensleydale demanded.

“Anyone could see it,” said Famine, brusquely.

“There’s not  _anyone_ ,” said Wensleydale. “There’s you. Are you sayin’ I’m a liar?”

Famine straightened his tie.

“I understand,” he said, “that you are upset. That’s why I’m proposing this deal. Because I think I can help you, and you can help me. It may seem to you that this is as right as anything. But how long until that changes like everything else did?”

Wensleydale pivoted on his heel and stared stiffly towards the red of the horizon. Around him, the cacti bloomed.

Famine continued, quietly, “How long until he says, ‘I can make myself friends. Good enough for playing with, anyway’?”

“No,” said Wensleydale. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Oh?”

“No. He’d just make us do what he wanted. He’d make us what he wanted. And we’d be good enough.”

“Is that right?” said Famine.

Wensleydale’s fist clenched against his thigh. He was removing his glasses, Famine saw, and wiping them furiously on his shirt.

“Your pal,” Famine coaxed. “The one who took Pollution’s crown. How’s he doing? He’ll need fixing soon. Adam will do it, won’t he.”

“Stop,” said Wensleydale. He turned back, and Famine saw clear trails of mucus on the boy’s upper lip. His features were puffed up with the suddenness of his grief, and Famine felt a twinge of what he assumed was distaste for the sight of all that flesh, crowding forward.

“What’s your deal, then?”

“I want you to let me into your head. Literally. That’s all. It won’t take much. Spit and a handshake and a little concentration on your part. But that way I’ll be able to help you every step of the way, and you can save them.”

“An’ what’s in it for you?” said Wensleydale.

“Me?” said Famine. “I… have a few complaints to register, myself.”

His smile was incredibly thin.

Wensleydale stared at him with pale, myopic eyes, and Famine wondered, idly, what he saw; what unfocused and horribly ordinary thing stood there. He decided he was glad he didn’t know.

“Spit?” the boy said.

“Yes,” said Famine. “I on your hand, you on mine.”

“Fine,” said Wensleydale, after the tiniest of hesitations.

Famine presented his palm. Wensleydale, after working at it for about a minute, produced an acceptable gobbet. It felt like acid, but Famine didn’t mind. He wouldn’t be feeling anything for long.

He spat into Wensleydale’s half-closed hand, with great precision, though not much actual liquid. He’d always had something of a dry mouth.

“Now,” said Famine, “when we shake, use what… he gave you.”

Wensleydale’s face was a mask. They shook.

“That tingles,” said the man who had been Famine, and then he slumped like a marionette with the strings snipped, or possibly blown up.

“It does,” Wensleydale agreed. The heap of businessman at his feet did not respond, but something inside him was faintly amused.

 

Aziraphale was treating Crowley’s sofa in ways it was never meant to be treated[1]. Crowley watched glumly as he hugged a cushion, and wiggled into a different cushion, and generally made himself completely and utterly at home. Though it was quite gratifying to see him jump when he discovered part of what he was lying on was not, in fact, sofa, but a web of fibers, with small white flowers interspersed.

“The thing is,” Crowley said aloud, “it could’ve been so much worse.”

“What,” said Aziraphale.

“How things turned out for us,” said Crowley. “Our fates. Etcetetetera.”

Aziraphale squinted at him through the bowl of his glass.

“Potato liquor doesn’t refract half so much as wine,” he confided, in what he possibly thought was an indoors voice.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Crowley told him.

“You are deliberately obtuse, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “and always have been.”

“Hey,” said Crowley, and fell silent, searching for something to add to this. As a comeback, he had to admit, it lacked a certain something. But there didn’t seem to be much else to say.

“’S’true,” said Aziraphale. “You pretend not to see.”

“You,” said Crowley, “aren’t even pretending to listen to me.”

Aziraphale looked faintly guilty. He reached over and refilled his glass.

“Go on, dear boy. I got a little distracted, but I’m listening.”

“Hmph,” said Crowley. He’d just about managed to undo the knot in his midsection, except for the last twist, and so was disposed to let Aziraphale’s blatant falsehoods pass with only an eyeroll or three. “Well. We’re all right, aren’t we? This isn’t so bad.”

“We’ve no purpose in being here,” said Aziraphale. “Your car’s burned up and my bookshop’s burned down. The world’s a jungle that doesn’t like me and as soon as we take one misstep, it’s home for us, so we’re not going to be able to enjoy existence half so much.”

“How d’you figure?” Crowley interjected.

“We’ll have to leave off doing all sorts of things,” Aziraphale said. “Like flying when there are cannonballs about. And feeding the ducks.”

Crowley yanked himself straight, once and for all.

“How could feeding the ducks get us discorporated?” he asked.

“Oh. It couldn’t, probably,” said Aziraphale. “But there are no more ducks.”

He paused. Crowley looked as expectant as a snake can.

“And that’s not bad?” he finished, less conclusively than he could have liked.

Crowley gave a noncommittal flick of his tail. “Honestly,” he said, “I can’t think how it could have turned out better.”

“Not even if we’d been at all competent?” said Aziraphale, with the ghost of a smile.

Crowley snorted into his saucer, streaming bubbles. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

Aziraphale put his hands together.

“You may have a point,” he said, low and unhappy.

“Cheer up,” Crowley told him. “We can still miracle up more alcohol. They didn’t take that away.”

Aziraphale nodded. Then, confusingly, he tried to shake his head mid-nod, leading to a kind of circular movement that reminded Crowley of nothing so much as a snake being charmed.

“I think we should go to Tadfield now,” he said. “If we’re going to go.”

“What?” 

“After that we can drink properly, y’see?”

“But-- but-- what about the missiles?” said Crowley, conscious of how flimsy it sounded even as he said it.

Aziraphale sniffed. “Missiles,” he said. “What do we care for missiles?”

Crowley examined this from several angles.

“…quite a lot?” he said.

“Sober up,” said Aziraphale, slurring a little, but slurring it briskly and determinedly. “We’ve put it off long enough. And I’m tired of specul-- speckle-- of talking about what could have been.”

Crowley made a wordless noise of protest, but he sobered up.

Aziraphale did likewise and gave him a wary once-over. In fairness, it was much harder to distinguish a sober snake from a drunk one than it is to distinguish a sober demon from a drunk one. Crowley was, nevertheless, annoyed.

“Believe me, I’m dry as your books,” he said. Then he cringed. “Er. That is, I--”

Aziraphale sighed and draped Crowley over his shoulders like a particularly unflattering scarf.

“Shush,” he said.

Crowley shushed.

Aziraphale went to the window and said a word. The glass still in the window shattered and fell away in a spray of aquamarine crystals.

Aziraphale pushed the frame out of the way.

“If you strangle me,” he said to Crowley, “you will make things very difficult for both of us.”

Crowley heard the seams on Aziraphale’s coat split, but at least he didn’t have to look at the wings, this time. “Sure,” he said, wrapping closer around Aziraphale’s neck. “No strangulation happening here, is there?”

“Try to relax, dear,” said Aziraphale, his tone inappropriately mirthful.

Then he jumped out the window.

Crowley tried, very hard, to relax.

[1] The ways it was meant to be treated were as follows: a) with the kind of terrified reverence more usually reserved for commanding officers who’re pretending, just now, to be unconscious, b) with the kind of totally unwarranted suspicion more usually reserved for commanding officers who are, in fact, unconscious, or c) with moisturising, chemical-free soap. 

 

The forest began to thin near Norton. It ended outright at the borders of the residential area of Lower Tadfield, where the shade and the complexity of leaves overhead gave way to pure sky. 

Humans adjust quickly, and Newt, edging onto tarmac, felt more than a little nervous to be back out in the open. He hadn’t been all that fond of the woods, but in the woods he didn’t have to look very far before him and he could always occupy himself with not tripping over anything, if he had unwelcome thoughts to ward off. Here there was sky, and rooftops, and the light got everywhere, so that the hot empty streets seemed to glow.

The only things he was tripping over here were his words.

“So, what,” he said. “What, you want to kill the-- the Antichrist?”

“The indirect approach failed,” said Anathema.

“But how will you find him?”

“I have tools,” said Anathema. “Back at the cottage. Which should, if all this is any indication, still be there…”

“You said yourself that he might not be around at all, what good will your tools--”

“He’s around,” said Anathema. “I wasn’t sure before, but this--” her arm swept up to include the length of the whole, unaltered avenue “--this clinches it. ”

“Why?”

“This is being  _preserved_ ,” said Anathema. “Don’t you see? Everything else he did was just… setting processes into motion. Spontaneous reforestation, as you put it. But keeping Tadfield the same is an ongoing effort.”

Newt stared at her.

“It makes sense,” she told him.

“Are you sure those were the kind of mushroom you wanted?” said Newt.

“Positive,” said Anathema, with a glittering glance over her shoulder. She walked on.

It occurred to Newt, hastening after her, that that could mean almost anything. He decided not to press the issue. Some things even silence was preferable to. And if he focused on her straight back, he could almost ignore the feeling of attentiveness, coming off the pretty houses, rising up from the tarmac that was sticking to his feet.

It wasn’t really all that different from the forest, when you got right down to it, he thought. More exposed, and with more fences: but the same alien will ran through it, like a vein, pulsing with life.

 

“It’s loved, you know,” said Aziraphale, as he glided down low over a dense sheet of cloud.

“What is?” said Crowley.

“London,” said Aziraphale. Then: “And everywhere else, too.”

“The same as what you felt in Tadfield?” said Crowley.

“ _Yes_.”

Crowley huddled against the vertebrae at the base of Aziraphale’s neck. “Oh,” he said hopelessly.

“Yes.”

“I guess we didn’t need to worry about anything getting destroyed, after all,” Crowley said, with false good cheer.

Aziraphale looked curiously back at him, over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “considering.” 

“Yes, all right, but the  _planet_ ’s perfectly safe. It’s  _loved_.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, it certainly is.”

“The trees, too. And the dirt, and the seas, and most of the dolphins, and so on.”

“The gorillas,” said Aziraphale.

“Yeah. With nests.”

The angel tilted one wing up, curving west. 

“Do you suppose we’ll know Tadfield when we see it?” he asked, abruptly.

“Sure,” said Crowley. “That is, unless we’re very lucky.”

“You suggested this course first, if I recall,” said Aziraphale mildly. A blue sheen of reflected sky waxed and waned on his feathers as his wings beat the thin air.

Crowley, who ranked the shifting of tweed over overdeveloped metaphorical shoulder muscles somewhere between thumbscrews and horses, when it came to uncomfortable sensations, was not inclined to be reasonable. “I hadn’t thought things through. Let’s go back and finish off the rest of my wine cabinet first.”

“My dear, you designed that cabinet to be impossible to finish,” Aziraphale said. “I distinctly remember you telling me all about it in 1183. You were quite pleased with yourself.”

“I’d forgotten about that!” said Crowley, truthfully[1]. “But I don’t see how that’s a flaw in my plan, anyhow. If anything it makes it even better.”

“Pleasant as the thought is,” said Aziraphale, “we are doing this first. You want to see for yourself, don’t you?”

“I’ve seen plenty,” said Crowley.

“Then one more thing can’t hurt,” said Aziraphale, cheerfully.

He punched through the cloud layer and out the other side.

When Crowley had warmed up enough to talk, he hissed, “That wasn’t very nice.”

“On the contrary,” said Aziraphale, speaking loudly to make himself heard over the noise of the wind rattling through his feathers as he dropped. “I was within miles of our destination, which is quite precise, I think you’ll agree. Look.”

Crowley looked where he indicated.

There was a hole, in the canopy, the size of a plate and growing as they descended. It gleamed like an open eye, staring out of the face of the earth.

“Yeah,” he said. “Precise. Yeah.”

They hurtled towards Tadfield. Crowley slithered into Aziraphale’s collar, leeching warmth from flesh and bone.

[1] Testing out his little masterpiece had not only erased his memories of making it, but also his memories of the preceding decade, which fact Aziraphale knew very well, and had milked to the very limit for centuries after when it came time to decide who would pay for dinner.

 

It was getting on toward evening in what had been the grasslands, and the shadows the trees threw reached into the next country over. 

Brian sat propped up against the light side of one. He was watching the sun lower over the river.

“Hey, boy,” said a woman’s voice, somewhere to the left of him.

Brian twisted around.

She was standing a few metres from where he sat, her hands on her hips, her feet planted far apart. She was very short and quite wide, and she was wearing a uniform that suggested she worked in some kind of pharmacy, with an apron and a nametag. Brian couldn’t read the handwriting on the nametag, though. At least, he didn’t think what he was reading on the nametag could possibly be right. There seemed to be altogether too many consonants, for one.

“You don’t look so good,” she informed him.

“I don’t feel so good,” he said, absently. It was an understatement, but then what wasn’t, today?

She came closer.

She was old, he saw, with almost as much surprise as he’d felt at seeing anyone at all here. Her short bristly hair was mostly white, and while it was hard to tell exactly how wrinkly she was, because her face was shaded and her skin was very dark to start with, he got the sense that her features had collapsed in a little, like his great-aunt Lily’s, only this woman’d had more face to start with so it made a different kind of outline.

“I have aspirin,” she said, fishing around in her breast pocket, so that the nametag tipped up and flashed white. He got a better glimpse of the name written there. Yes, there really were that many consonants, as far as he could tell. 

“You don’t have to--” he began, sudden guilt washing through him just like all his other bodily fluids had at various points over the course of the day.

“It’s nothing,” she said, so forcefully that he shut up.

After a little more rummaging, she produced a bottle. “Here we go. No water, but it’ll do. Eh?”

Brian took the pill she gave him and gulped it down without further protest. “Thanks,” he said.

The woman nodded. Then she plumped down in front of him, blocking out the trail of light on the water in his view.

“First person I’ve found, you are,” she said.

“You’re the first person who’s found me,” said Brian, smiling shakily.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

Brian wondered how he could explain. He wondered what he would explain if he were going to try. About the young man with the white jacket and the terrified face, or about Adam, or--

“I dunno, exactly,” he said. “It just happened. Everythin’ just happened.”

“You think that pill will help?” she asked.

“I…” said Brian. He thought about it. “Prob’ly not,” he said, and added, “Sorry.”

“They’ll expire in another day or so,” she said, shrugging. “It was you or no one.”

Brian looked at his scuffed trainers.

“I was thinking of taking more from the shelves, when I ran out of the shop,” she said. “Shame I didn’t. I was in such a rush.”

“I don’t think there’s many pills that’d help me,” said Brian, with perfect accuracy.

“That right?” said the woman. “Well.”

She leaned back, folding her hands over her knees.

“Someone do that to you?” she said, nodding to his faintly greenish face.

Brian opened his mouth to deny this, and found himself saying, “Yes. In a sort of way.”

“Then someone can undo it,” she said.

“…yes,” said Brian.

She looked at him like his great-aunt had, once, after going off her medications for a day. Her eyes were clear and hard.

“You should probably find them,” she said. “You’re sick, boy.”

Brian put a hand on his stomach, and pressed down.

“I could go with you, maybe,” said the woman. “I don’t know what went on last night but my grandchildren haven’t called and I saw my daughter wink out like an old lightbulb. I don’t mind helping you find a doctor. Or whoever it is you think can help.”

Brian said, “Would you really?”

“Sure,” said the woman. 

“I…” said Brian.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. Brian had never wanted anything so much as he wanted to tell her yes, please, come with me. But he remembered the emptiness in Lower Tadfield. How Adam had hollowed it out.

“I think… I think I might have to go to him alone,” he said, quietly.

The woman pursed her lips.

“How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

She hunched forward and rested her chin on her knee. “Is that right,” she said. “That’s quite an age.”

Brian replied, barely knowing what he was saying, “I guess it’s just my age.”

“Do you want to go to this man?” she asked.

“If he makes me better,” he said, and stopped. He covered his lips.

“Fixing is a tricky business,” said the woman.

“Not for him, it isn’t,” said Brian, bleakly.

The woman gave him a sharp look. “How’s that pill taking,” she said.

Brian shook his head. Then he had to turn away to dry retch, water dribbling out of his mouth.

He heard her say, “Well. Maybe a good fixing isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a body.”

A shudder ran through him, as if every cell in him was seconding the sentiment. They’d know, after all.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You do what you got to,” she said. The sun was behind her head, by then, and she was a silhouette, but he could feel her gaze on him. He could just about make out the pale gleam of the whites of her eyes. “I’ve done it. I guess in times like these there’s a lot of doing, or none.”

Brian wanted, very badly, for her to tell him it was okay. What he’d already done. He began to say something.

Then he saw over her shoulder to where a familiar figure was taking form in the shallows at the shore of the river.

“Wensley!” he shouted, shocked and even delighted. 

The woman looked around.

“That your man?” she said.

“Wha-- no,” Brian said. “No. He’s just a friend.”

“You aren’t so unlucky as I thought you were, then,” she said, gently. 

She helped him to his feet.

Brian said, “Thank you,” as Wensleydale waded up onto grass. “For the pill, an’ for… clearin’ me up.”

She wasn’t looking at him, though. She was gazing at Wensleydale, and she looked afraid.

Brian looked, too. And Wensleydale, he realised, was different. Was maybe something where he could see why someone would be afraid of him.

“Hullo, Brian,” Wensleydale said. His voice, normally reedy, had strange echoes. There were gurgles there, and groans, in the smallness of the space between his words.

“Hi,” said Brian. “How’d you get here?”

“I walked,” said Wensleydale. “We can go anywhere. I worked it out, d’you see? We can go anywhere we like now.”

He lifted his hand. In it he held the scales, and they swung, gently, on the ends of the bar.

“You’ve got your crown, don’t you?” said Wensleydale.

Brian became aware that the woman was shaking.

“This is a bad business,” she said, her voice cold.

Brian took the crown out of his pocket. It glistened blackly.

“I’ve got to,” he said to her.

“I guess you do,” she said, and: 

“You should go. You should go  _now_.”

“Okay,” mumbled Brian. “Okay. I will. Sorry. I’m sorry.”

Wensleydale looked as if he’d have liked to ask the woman something, but she made a sign with her fingers, and he flinched.

“C’mon,” he said to Brian. “This way.”

The woman watched them go. The lines in her face were deeply drawn, now.

After a while she went back into the copse of trees that should not have been there, and smelled the gum, and tried to slow the beating of her heart. She did not see the sun begin to set. Which was a pity, because it was going to be a very beautiful sunset, if not, perhaps, so brilliant as it had been when this part of the river was a heavily industrialised trading center, yesterday afternoon. But the sky shimmered like the edge of an oil spill and the sun was like a thing shining through a layer of rust, for a few minutes there, as two boys walked off that corner of the Earth.

 

Anathema was weaving together string, and leaves, and lint, and a slice of hardboiled egg[1]. Newt watched in morbid fascination as her fingers flew through the… materials, pulling a kind of structure out of nonsense. It was, he thought, almost exactly the inverse of what happened when he put his hands on a keyboard and tried to write some code.

“What’s that supposed to be?” he inquired, tentatively. 

“It’s a shambles,” she said. “It tells me what I want to know. In theory. Normally I’d use more technically reliable methods, but…”

Newt said, “Under the circumstances.”

“Exactly.” 

He wandered away from the kitchen table and into the bedroom.

Everything looked… as they’d left it, he thought, with a thrill. The unmade bed, the dent in the wall where his head had made high-velocity contact, the crumbling plaster. It was almost like looking at a life. It was as though this stranger’s house he moved uneasily around in was part of his story, or like he was part of its.

“Fuck,” said Anathema, audible through the wall.

Newt hurried out. “What is it?”

“The shambles broke,” she said, holding up the snapped threads demonstratively.

“Oh,” he said. “What does that mean?”

“I--”

She shook the tattered nest. It seemed to tighten, snarling around her slim fingers. 

[1] Actually, what she did to the hard-boiled egg had much the same relationship to weaving as corsets did to choreography. But close enough.

 

“Okay,” said Crowley, “we’re here. We’ve seen. We’re all caught up. Let’s get out now, shall we? While we can?”

Aziraphale didn’t seem to be listening. He was strolling down the country lane as though he was just out for a bit of fresh air and perhaps a chat with the neighbors. He’d winched his wings in, though there were still long tears running up and down the back of his jacket.

“What is it you’re hoping to accomplish?” Crowley asked.

Aziraphale stopped.

“Crowley,” he said, “if you like, I can put you down, now. You don’t have to accompany me.”

“Oh, for-- don’t be like that,” Crowley hissed. “I told you, didn’t I? The Arrangement’s working just fine. Excuse me if I’m curious about your motives, angel, but that doesn’t mean…”

“I’d like to talk to the other children,” said Aziraphale.

Crowley blinked. Fortunately, Aziraphale was staring straight ahead when it happened, and Crowley recovered quickly.

“I saw them,” he said. “Two boys and a girl…?”

“Crown, scales, sword,” murmured Aziraphale.

“He would have needed them,” said Crowley, thoughtfully. “To do all this. That’s why you think they’re around somewhere. Makes sense, but-- he’s the  _Antichrist._ ”

“The Horsepersons are essential to any major reshaping of the Earth,” said Aziraphale. “No matter who’s technically responsible.”

Crowley considered this.

“So what you’re saying is,” he said, “these human children-- did this. As much as he did. And if we talk to them--”

“Perhaps we could come to some more acceptable arrangement,” finished Aziraphale. He favoured Crowley with a nervous grin.

“You must be insane,” said Crowley, slowly. “ _I_  must be insane.”

“I believe our respective superiors came to that conclusion long ago,” said Aziraphale, blandly.

Crowley laughed aloud.

“What the hell,” he said. He was feeling more than a little manic. “Who knows. It might even be fun. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, since we tried to persuade people of things directly?”

“Oh, yes,” said Aziraphale; “ages.”

His shoulders loosened. Crowley hadn’t noticed how tense he’d been up to then, but he noticed the relaxing of muscle, and took it as his cue to curl in.

“Where are we going?” he asked, because Aziraphale was moving again, in a determined sort of way.

“With the love,” said Aziraphale, shrugging. “It’s like--” he fumbled for some suitable comparison “--like you and heat. I know where the hot spots are. The hot spot, really.”

Crowley gave a sceptical huff, but the complaints ceased to flow, which Aziraphale counted as a small and important victory[1]. He went on, feeling the love.

[1] Up there with such subtle moments of triumph for divine good sense as floss, umbrellas, and C.S. Lewis.

 

“Give me your pin,” Anathema said.

“Sorry?”

“Your witchfinder’s pin,” Anathema said, enunciating.

Newt handed it to her and watched her begin to reconstruct her work.

The witch wielding the pin. Shadwell was probably rolling in his--

“Oh,” he said.

“What?”

“I just… my sergeant,” said Newt. “I didn’t even. He’s probably dead. He’s this extraordinary man, and he was in London when it all went to hell, and--[1]”

He broke off.

“I’m sorry,” said Anathema, and for a moment her expression was soft, and Newt felt a horrible numbness creeping in, as though his old life-- his  _old_  life, before he was a private, or an anything-- was rushing back.

Then the pin she’d inserted in the center of the egg popped out like a silvery, pointed, superheated champagne cork, and the numbness was gone, all right. 

“He’s here,” said Anathema, knocking her chair over in her haste.

“ _Here_?” Newt yelped.

Anathema nodded to the window, where there was, blurrily visible through thick glass, a boy leaning his bike against the fence.

Newt said, “Oh, my god.”

“Not exactly,” said Anathema.

She picked up the gun. In her hand it shone like a star.

[1] It might have comforted Newt to know that Shadwell was not, by any conventional measure, dead. He was with the rest of the unwanted human race, in a place that lies outside the purview of this story, and at that very moment he was thinking, in perfect sync with a lot of other Shadwells across the multiverse,  _We could hide. And it’d be the witches’ turn to find us._

 

Then again, it might not have.

The girl was the only one in the quarry when they arrived. She was sitting on an old milk crate, and the sword was in her lap.

Aziraphale, standing over her, remembered Eve after Abel’s death. How she had hacked apart wood as she wept. The girl was dripping wet, and shivering, and there was violence in every quake that ran through her small frame, though she did not shift from her seat.

“Who’re you?” she said, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes.

Aziraphale searched for something to say.

“I used to own that sword of yours,” he said, eventually.

The girl frowned.

“No, you din’t,” she said. “I know who owned it before me. You’re not her.”

Aziraphale carefully shut out the quiet, snaky sniggering in his ear.

“No,” he agreed. “I owned it before she did, even. I was its first owner, you could say.”

“She had it for a long time,” argued the girl.

“It was a long time ago,” said Aziraphale.

The girl’s eyes narrowed.

“So?” she said. “What d’you want with it now, then?”

“Want with it?” said Aziraphale. “Nothing, my dear. But I think you should know about what it can do.”

The girl’s face closed off.

“I already do,” she muttered, her hair falling like a copper visor down over her eyes. 

“May I see it?” said Aziraphale, patiently.

“I’m so impressed by your people skills,” Crowley whispered.

“I promise I have no interest in taking the sword from you,” continued Aziraphale, raising his voice a little. “I will give it back as soon as I’ve shown you something.”

“I don’t care,” said the girl. “Huh. You couldn’t take it from me if I didn’t want you to, anyhow.”

“Assuredly not,” Aziraphale agreed.

She held it out, point-first. 

Aziraphale took it by the blade, gingerly, and swapped his grip down to the handle as soon as she let go. He lifted it to eye level, and--

“Well?” she said.

He concentrated. There was a  _whoomph_ , and the sword flamed white, as though a door in the wall of reality had been pulled ajar, and light was pouring through.

“Once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget,” said the angel.

The girl said, weakly:

“Gosh.”

“Take it,” said Crowley, in Aziraphale’s voice, because Aziraphale seemed transfixed, though he did at least have the presence of mind to allow the girl to slip it out of his hold.

She wrapped both her grubby hands around the hilt, and held it up, her expression reverent and far too old for her. “Wow _ie_ ,” she said, slashing downwards and leaving a flaming afterimage like the tail of a comet scrawled across Aziraphale’s sight. 

He cringed. “Do be careful with that,” he said.

“Oh, def’nitely,” said the girl, carving a figure eight of fire out of the chalky air.

“Maybe you should have talked first and given presents second,” Crowley said, as she practised.

“It’s possible,” admitted Aziraphale. “But I think--”

She froze. She’d been lunging, her sword arm extended, the sword run straight through some imagined foe, and her stillness, new and awful, yanked the eye toward it. She’d dried off.

“What  _is_  it, then?” she said. “This sword. I thought it was… somethin’ else. It din’t feel like  _this_ , before. It’s-- it’s--”

Aziraphale exchanged glances with Crowley.

“It’s been many things,” he said. “It has done everything a sword can do.”

“So you’re sayin’,” said Pepper, with the care of a polar bear easing out onto thin, thin ice, “you’re sayin’, I can choose. What it is, an’ what it does.”

Aziraphale breathed out.

“Yeah,” said Crowley, emerging from inside his shirt. “That’s the idea.”

Pepper glared at him. “Snakes can’t talk.”

Aziraphale had a sudden fit of coughing into the crook of his elbow. Crowley, helpfully, thwacked him on the back a few times with his tail.

“Girls don’t generally fight with flaming swords,” he said, coldly. “But today’s an unusual day.”

“That’s sexism,” said Pepper, raising the sword.

“And yours was speciesism.”

“Really, my dear,” murmured Aziraphale.

“She started it!” Crowley said.

Pepper scoffed.

“Which is the other thing,” Crowley said, softly, his voice turning sleek. “You were part of how  _this_  started, too.”

“Huh?” 

“The new Earth. With its kingdoms, and none of its people? You may have noticed.”

The girl took a step back, until the corner of the milk crate was biting into the undersides of her knees. 

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t me. That was all Adam.”

“If that were true it would make matters much simpler,” muttered Aziraphale. “But I’m afraid that it was you, my dear. Some of it. That sword was a tool, and you, my dear… wielded it.”

“They’re right, Pepper,” said Wensleydale, rippling in[1]. 

Brian followed, at a slight delay. Pepper turned to them.

“Hallo,” she said, blankly. “Wasn’t expectin’ you back so soon.”

“Hi,” said Brian.

“We did this,” said Wensleydale, urgently. “To our _selves._ ”

She stared at his serious face. 

Crowley hissed, “Is that…?”

“Scales,” said Aziraphale, absently.

“Yes, I know, but what I mean is… he hasn’t… The old Famine?”

Aziraphale squinted. 

“Oh. Yes.”

“Was that supposed to happen?” Crowley said.

Aziraphale looked at him.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Wonderful,” said Crowley. He began to shift in agitation. Aziraphale put a quelling hand on his tail.

“My dear fellow, settle down.”

Crowley settled down, and turned his attention back to the children. Pepper’s expression was decidedly mulish; Brian’s had a sheepish air. 

Wensleydale’s had probably never been seen in any barnyard, ever[2].

“So we can take it back,” he was saying. “There was a plan, a real plan. Grown-ups made it. We can go back to that, instead of-- of--”

His eyes burned with starved light. Flames crackled down Pepper’s sword.

“Followin’ Adam any longer,” she finished for him.

“Wait,” said Brian, his face white and clean and uncertain. Without the layer of dirt obscuring detail, his features looked very naked in the late afternoon sun. “We can’t-- we’re… Adam’s….”

He trailed off.

“Not anymore, we aren’t,” said Pepper. 

“But he’s our friend. He’s more our side than some grownup,” said Brian. “An’-- an’ he gave us the world, the whole  _world_ , I mean…”

“Do you want it?” Wensleydale said.

Brian flinched. “Of course not!”

“Well?” said Wensleydale.

“The little bastard,” murmured Crowley, admiringly. 

Aziraphale didn’t answer. He was standing very still, watching, and Crowley was reminded of how he’d looked in the pits of the Globe, when Crowley’d finally convinced him to check out this new kind of theatre; how utterly preoccupied he’d seemed, because of a few humans on a platform. Crowley, for his part, preferred films.

“Couldn’t we just try talking to him?” Brian said.

“Talking to him?” said Pepper. Her mouth stretched into a sort of smile. “You try. It’s a waste of breathing, talking to him.”

Brian was beginning to get angry.

“So what, then,” he said. “What is it you want to do? Are we goin’ to ambush him? Are we Johnsonites, now, or what?”

“Johnsonites?” Crowley whispered.

“Early breakaway sect, I think,” said the angel. “Sort of Gnostics. Like the Ophites.” His forehead creased. “Or were they the Sethites? No, I'm thinking of the Collyridians. Oh dear. I'm sorry, there were hundreds of them, it's so hard to keep track.”

“All those people,” said Crowley.

“Greasy Johnson’s gone,” Pepper said.

“And we’re us,” said Wensleydale, though his tone had lost some of its imperious echoes. “We’re us and we’ll do what we ought to, that’s all.”

“ _How’ll we know when we’ve done it_?” said Brian. “It’s all right for you two-- you’re not all messed up inside, an’ I guess you can do what you like. But I’ve got to… I need--”

Wensleydale appeared to be listening.

“If we deal with Adam,” he said at last, slowly, “that’ll get better.”

Pepper gave him a sharp look. Brian, though, took a deep shuddery breath and closed his eyes.

“Well?” said Wensleydale.

“You got me, I guess,” Brian said, in a voice that creaked like a rusting hinge. It was an old voice. “Let’s do it, then. Let’s just do it.”

[1] If you took a video of a boy’s reflection on the surface of some still body of water, being disturbed and then dissolved by falling rain, and played that in reverse, it would give a good idea of how Wensleydale and Brian looked when they walked in. It is not recommended that you draw any conclusions from this, since the physical processes involved were entirely unrelated in every possible respect and several impossible ones.

[2] Though it might have shown up in a chicken coop during particularly bad winters.

 

“Let me out,” said Anathema.

“No,” said Newt. 

The door pressed into his shoulderblades. The doorknob, for its part, got overfriendly with his hip. But he was resolute, he thought. There was no way he was moving. Not even to reposition his belt.

“You’re not being very sensible,” said Anathema. “Don’t you agree that  _someone_  needs to do the job?”

“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”

“You said you were a pacifist.”

“You said you were a vegetarian!”

“Believe me, I’m not going to eat him.”

“Anathema,” Newt began, “while I--”

“That’s my name,” she said, smiling brilliantly. “Don’t wear it out.”

“-- _respect_  that you are an adult woman and perfectly capable of, um, making your own choices, and-- and so on, I really don’t think you’ve thought this through, first, and second, you’re going to die!”

“Yesterday I was going to die,” said Anathema. “There are more important things today.”

There was a knocking on the door.

“That’s him,” said Anathema. “I think you should get out of the way.”

Newt gaped at her.

Several things occurred after that in rapid succession.

First, the door opened in a way that suggested it would not be closing again soon, and Newt, who’d been leaning his full weight on it, stumbled backwards over the doorstep. Adam stepped neatly out of his way, so he toppled gracefully down onto the lawn uninterrupted.

He did not witness the details of what happened next. They happened anyway.

Second, Anathema’s hand swung up, and she pulled the trigger.

Third, Adam stopped smiling.

The bullet exploded into shards of hot metal an inch from his nose. Haloed by flying lead, he looked like an angel with an agenda. 

Anathema pulled the trigger again, but nothing came out.

Adam looked at her, his eyes the solid blue of the sky, which men once imagined, more correctly than they could ever know, to be just another kind of ceiling. “What was that for?” he said, sounding as injured as he wasn’t.

Anathema’s throat worked.

“I came here to ask if you’d seen what I did,” said Adam, louder. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

He stepped forward. The broken bullet clattered to the floor. 

“I put rainforests in,” he said, slowly. “An’ whales, for you.”

Pain flashed across her face, sudden as a summer storm. She lowered the gun. Adam took another step.

“An’ I got rid of the rubbish,” he continued.

“You got rid of the  _people_ , Adam,” said Anathema, with some effort. 

“But you wanted that, too,” said Adam. 

“I did  _not_  want--”

She stopped, as memories of what she had, in fact, said came flooding back to her.  _White South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of everywhere, but especially here…_

“But I didn’t mean I wanted them to die,” she said.

“They didn’t die!” said Adam, indignantly. “Well, mostly. I just took ‘em out. They were messin’ everything up, so I took ’em out. They should leave, you said.”

“Where did you put them?”

Adam shrugged.

“Where they’d fit,” he said.

“That’s awful,” she said, surprised by how much she meant it. 

Adam crossed his arms.

“I don’t see how. I’m lookin’ out for you, and for my  _friends_. I’m takin’ care of the Earth. An’ for the rest, well, what I did to them was better than what they’d have gotten otherwise.”

“That’s not an excuse,” said Anathema.

“No,” said Adam calmly, “it’s a reason.”

He set his chin. He seemed to have grown, and probably he had, Anathema thought, with some viciousness. He would have wanted to. 

He was very beautiful. He looked like a future no one had ever seen.

As if of its own accord, her empty hand went up. She wanted, she thought, to see that warm calm go. She felt angry enough for an entire species. She’d felt it all day, and--

She saw Newt, clinging to the doorframe.

She lowered her arm. She could have shot the Antichrist easily, but hit him? There were limits. He was, after all, just a kid.

Probably no one had ever laid a hand on Adam in his whole life. His mother didn’t believe in corporal punishment, and his father thought the elbow grease was more usefully spent on his car. So perhaps he didn’t realise what had taken place. But his mother and his father were gone, too, and he had seen things on the telly, and in Anathema’s head; so perhaps he did. Either way, his face went, if anything, calmer. She’d thought when she’d first seen him that he should have been the model for some long-dead sculptor, and now she could see what that would look like, only with more colour in his skin and something nameless and old stirring in his gaze.

“I guess you didn’t like it,” he said. “It was s’posed to be a present, for you and for everyone. I kept  _him_  jus’ for you,” he added, jerking a thumb at Newt, who froze in the act of approaching. “I was awfully nice, I thought. But I don’t need you, anyhow. You’re jus’ like the rest of them, reelly. You’re  _boring_.”

Anathema did not speak.

Adam slouched out, his hands in his pockets. Newt reached out a trembling hand when he passed, as if to grab his arm, or hold him back, and Anathema thought, distractedly, that she had never seen a braver inch of gawky wrist, extending from his too-short sleeve.

His fingers, though, slid off Adam’s T-shirt like it was marble, not cloth. And Adam left.

Anathema fired five bullets into the ceiling, in a rough ring. A cloud of plaster floated down, and she coughed. She coughed and coughed and Newt eased the gun out of her hand and she laughed, a little, and coughed as though her breath had turned against her. 

 

“He’s coming,” said Crowley, into the quiet.

The Them’s shadows lengthened. Brian, gently, set the crown on his matted hair. Without further discussion, they scrambled up the far side of the quarry and disappeared into the thicket beyond, quick as snakes before a saint whose breakfast had been interrupted.

“Are we sticking around?” said Crowley, gazing at the empty quarry. “We’ve only got these bodies, remember? And--”

“We only have these bodies,” said Aziraphale. “That’s not much to lose, considering.”

“These bodies and quite a lot thousand-year-old mead still to go, then,” Crowley said, irritated.

Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “I never did like the honey-based ones,” he said.

This comment struck Crowley as being so infuriatingly obstructive that he began laughing, and could not, once he’d started, stop. He flapped against Aziraphale’s shoulders, helplessly.

“Do try to be careful,” said Aziraphale, managing a decent impression of sincere concern. “You don’t actually have the vocal cords for that sort of thing, my dear. Or at all.”

“Really?” said Crowley. “None? Huh. That explains a lot, actually. Doesn’t seem very well thought out, but then--”

The rest of whatever he was going to say was lost to posterity[1], because then they heard the clank of a bike being propped up against a tree. 

Aziraphale crossed briskly over to the milk crate. He rolled up his sleeves and sat down. 

“Oo,” he said, “comfy.” 

He smiled at Crowley. 

“You,” said Crowley, not without a hint of grudging admiration, “are a bit of a bastard.”

“I always knew you had a spark of goodness in you,” Aziraphale. 

Crowley supposed he’d deserved it, at that. And it wasn’t as if there was anyone to hear. 

He slithered down to the angel’s forearm and wormed between the soft fingers, like ambitious rope. He didn’t, after all, want to fall off.

[1] It almost certainly involved the phrase “unintelligent design” and some scathing reference to the  _Ornithorhynchus_  genus, though. Some aspects of Crowley’s rhetorical strategy never changed.

 

Adam got off his bike. 

He felt a bit odd. The viscera of his wounded innocence had trailed behind him all down the lane, and though he’d almost forgotten his encounter with Anathema now, his nerves were still jangling like a particularly badly-paid orchestra.

But his friends were in the quarry; he could hear them. He’d come up with more plans, when he was running after Dog. They’d never be short of plans again, he thought. No more long listless afternoons.

He went through the thorn trees, which parted for him, just a little; and he hopped down into the hole to join the Them. 

Which would’ve been great, except everything was wrong. There were strangers in the hole, sitting on the milk crate like they owned the place, and his friends were nowhere to be seen. The indignation, which had receded so rapidly on the road, came rushing back.

“Put your hands up,” he told the intruders roughly, in the way he imagined a respectable gangster would, on discovering police in his den.

The man stood, and raised his hands. The effect was a little marred by the fact that in one of his hands he was holding a snake. He didn’t look like the sort of fellow who was supposed to go around holding snakes, not when Adam himself had never held a snake, ever, because the titchy garden ones didn’t count. It wasn’t fair. The man looked about as boring as was possible while still moving about, and he got big black an’ red snake that Adam hadn’t even seen in the zoo.

Of course, the man wasn’t really a man, and the snake wasn’t really a snake, and Adam could have just made himself a snake, and would as soon as he’d dealt with this, but he still spent a moment wallowing in resentful envy.

“What’re you doing here?” he said. A thought struck him. “Did you do something to my friends?”

He raised his hands, too, and forked tongues of electricity lapped at his palms.

“Not exactly,” said the angel, sidling back around the crate. “That is, er, your friends? Haven’t seen any--”

“Don’t you try an’ lie to me,” Adam said, shaking with fury. “Where’d they go?”

“A  _good_  question,” said the snake, its tongue flickering out as if in answer to the sparks dancing along Adam’s nails.

Adam raised one hand.

 

“Here goes,” said Brian.

The Them crept forward.

“One,” said Wensleydale. “Two--”

“On the three or right after?” said Brian. 

“On,” snapped Wensleydale.

“Only checking.”

“ _Three_.”

The three children sprang. 

One, though, was yanked back.

“Hey!” hissed Pepper. It would have been a shriek, but the breath had been knocked out of her.

A red grin glistened in the gloom. 

“Hey,” said War.

 

Adam closed the raised hand into a fist. 

There was a crack. He looked up, just in time to see Wensleydale and Brian leap down from the trees, their arms raised and full of silver. For a moment they seemed to hang suspended in the air, their shadows like the shadows of birds.

They hit the ground, and stumbled, and Adam said their names. And then Wensleydale was pushing him to the ground and Brian was sitting on his knees and it was all, all wrong.

“Ah,” said the snake, “ _there_  they are.”

 

Not very far above, Pepper squirmed free of War. War flipped her around and slammed her against the gnarled trunk of a thorn tree, pinning her at the shoulders.

Pepper kicked out, with the incredible anatomical precision conferred on her by seven years of association with males. War’s grin widened like a waxing moon. When Pepper’s foot fell back, she stepped delicately onto Pepper’s toes.

“You never let me finish, little girl,” she said.

“I’ve got other things to do,” Pepper growled, scrabbling at the smooth backs of War’s hands.

“Best time, don’t you think?” said War, leaning in. Pepper, caught, smelled nail polish remover, and blood under the skin.

 

Under the cliff, three small boys grappled with one another. 

Aziraphale made as if to lend a hand a few times, darting forward and skipping back at the last second, when he realised that whatever plan he’d come up with this time depended on that trainer right there belonging to an entirely different boy. Crowley didn’t know why he bothered: the rising dust made it almost impossible to distinguish them, masking the flash of Wensleydale’s glasses and Brian’s crown and Adam’s hands as it did, and there’d be no miracles in that fight.

For his part, he stared at the lip of the cliff. If the girl came now, things could still be salvaged. Adam obviously wasn’t used to being attacked by his lieutenants. Adam wouldn’t have partaken much in the scuffling of the Them, over the years. Adam--

Adam said their names again.

 

“Brian and Wensley--” Pepper said.

“You little fool,” said War, “I’m trying to help you. And them. Your leader is stronger than mine. Yes. But together we can be stronger than either of them.  _Think_.”

Pepper spat. Her saliva sizzled in the dirt. “What about?” she hissed.

“Your  _friends_ ,” said War, dripping disdain. “Their plan’s not going to work without me, you see. Famine’s too slow. Pollution isn’t on offer. This-- this is my work. Our work.”

Pepper opened her mouth, and closed it again. 

She thought about her friends, and especially about her friend Adam, who was gone.

“What is it you want?” she said, quietly.

 

“Stop,” said Adam. “I command you.”

And, like that, it stopped.

At least, the movement stopped. The rage, though: that moved through him. And it wasn’t his rage.

“I don’t understand,” he said, the words forming like mountains of sound, forced into being by the rearrangement of tectonic plates. 

Aziraphale put his hands over his ears. Crowley, handless and earless, absorbed the vibrations.

“ _I fixed it_ ,” Adam said. 

“I fixed the whole world,” he said. “And now everyone’s fussin’. Always fussin’. What is it you all want?”

He heard them think,

_You didn’t fix Lower Tadfield._

The inaccuracy of this-- the unfairness-- was such that for a while he could not speak.

“I spent my whole life fixin’ Tadfield for us,” he nearly shouted, when he managed to say anything. “They would’ve filled in this quarry when we were in second grade if it wasn’t for me. They would have put a nasty old highway through, if it wasn’t for me. They would have made us learn to read with putty. They would’ve messed it up. They always mess it up!”

He was shaking, now. His fingers jerked and his face twisted and it was like watching the collapse of a tower, slowed down almost, but not quite, to an act of photography. He tore out of the skinny arms of the other boys one limb at a time. They didn’t want to let him go. He rose anyway.

“An’ you,” he said, glaring at the angel and the snake. “I know all about you two. You were goin’ to have a little bet, you were. You were goin’ to give me  _tutors._ ”

“That’s not quite fair,” said the angel, lifting his head, slowly. He paused, and added, “In any case, don’t you think perhaps you might have needed them?”

“I’ve learned my lesson,” said Adam, coldly. “A lot better than some people. I know better’n to let the enemy get in the way.”

“Ouch,” said the snake, which was wrapping itself around the angel’s wrist. “You got us.” 

Its eyes were very yellow and Adam could see the fear in them. 

“We’re really bad about letting enemies get in the way,” it went on, levelly. “Sometimes we even work with them, because otherwise things get broken. Forever.”

Its pupils widened a little as it spoke, until they looked for all the world like the slots in an arcade machine, where the coin goes, after the game is over.

 

“Just let me in,” said the woman, tilting her head up. A shaft of sun, penetrating the density of thorns, caught the edge of her brown eye and fired it a strange raw gold.

“What?” said Pepper. 

War looked back down at Pepper.

“Into your head, that is,” she said, “if you feel up to it. That’s what, what did you call him?-- your Wensley did. You must have felt it.”

Pepper said, “How?”

“Shake on it,” said War. “He gave you some power, didn’t he? A little power and some blood would do it. Mine and yours.”

She hunkered down until Pepper could see the traces of old lipstick in the creases of her mouth.

“Quickly.”

Pepper nodded, and rocked forward without warning, a rolling kind of shove. War, whose weight had been unevenly distributed, to put it politely, was sent tripping sideways.

Pepper walked past her to the edge. 

She saw the tableau: Wensleydale and Brian frozen in attitudes of violence. The former owner of her sword, backing away. Adam.

“You need me, now,” War croaked. “Or you’ll just run away. You think I can’t see?”

Pepper was silent. She could picture, very clearly, how angry she would have gotten at such an accusation, a day ago. Now she just felt tired.

“Get me out of this damn body,” War said. “Get me out and I’ll do the rest.”

Very slowly, Pepper lowered the sword. 

Its point came to rest a metre from the fallen Horseperson, and War’s hand shot out and wrapped around the its tip like a striking cobra, if a striking cobra had no survival instinct whatsoever. 

The blood welled, between her knuckles. The blade’s pale fire retreated from her flesh like water does from wind.

War let out a happy sigh. 

“Now you,” she said.

Pepper brought the flame-lined edge up on her palm. There was no heat at all. 

Crouching down beside the woman, she shook on it. And felt War’s body go limp, under the stiff red leather. It took perhaps a minute; it left a little blood on Pepper’s fingers and a shadow on Pepper’s sight.

“I’ve only got one friend now,” she heard Adam say, as if from far off.

She descended.

 

“Not when I do it,” the boy who still called himself Adam said. “Nothing has to break.”

Aziraphale said, “Except your friends?”

Adam made a gesture. The ground surged under Aziraphale; he reeled sideways and hit the chalk cliff hard before sliding down in a heap. 

Crowley, who’d been caught between the angel’s arm and the wall, almost lost consciousness.

He heard Adam say, as if from very far off, “I’ve only got one friend now.” 

 

And then there were Pepper and Adam.

“One friend’s enough,” said Adam, his smile tentative and hopeful and sweet as he ended his circling in front of her. He had more control, now. He could move like his old self. Brian and Wensley were only currents in the seas of his mind, even if they pushed out on the sides of his head.

“Yeah,” said Pepper, stretching an unmarked hand towards him.

He went to her. She touched his cheek, curiously, her fingers more probing than tender. 

Then she took the sword out from behind her back and ran him through.

There was some resistance, but what the hell; there always was, at that. 

 

Adam screamed. 

It was a sound that maybe only a mortal throat could have uttered, and it did not last very long. 

Long enough, though.

 

“Ah,” said the Metatron, looking up from his paperwork.

 

Brian and Wensleydale came running over, silver whirling. They needn’t have bothered. By then he was well and truly alight. The sword’s fire, which had left War unscathed and the thorn trees cold and which did not jump to Pepper’s T-shirt in all the time she stood there, holding Adam up-- it caressed him as a mother does her son. It started from his heart and worked outward, until he was outlined in white, and it did not move more than an inch past his edge.

The blood got everywhere, though. So did the ash, once there was ash. It spattered Brian and Wensleydale with black; Pepper it soaked all down her front, until the brightly-coloured cartoon logo on her T-shirt was entirely unidentifiable, as was her face.

She pulled the sword out, eventually. It was just a sword. The flame, by then, had found a better home.

 

And Adam died, eventually. He died like a witch: in flames, with the universe listening. 

He didn’t have eighty pounds of gunpowder concealed in his shorts, but the noise was such that he might as well have. It was the kind of noise you get when an unimaginably large number of horns[1] blow all at once.

Thunder rolled. And on the wings of the storm came-- well, wings. Wings without end. 

The storm, which had been waiting all day for its chance to resume, didn’t bother itself unduly about its unasked-for passengers. A half of it massed on each side and they met in the middle, like a sea closing after being parted; or like the shutting of an eye.

[1] Along with a selection of trumpets, bugles, pipes, and, for some reason, a tuba. It was a miracle[2], really, that you could almost pick out a tune[3]. And that’s not even getting into the string accompaniment.

[2] Which perhaps explains why from the Hellish side, you  _couldn’t_ , although the Bachs were doing their collective best.

[3] The tune in question was ‘shave and a haircut: two pence.’ But no one ever said it was a very large miracle. The angels had other things on their mind.

 

And there was also this: somewhere, on the wrong side of the world, a dog began to howl.

 

Anathema sat on the front step of Jasmine Cottage. Her head was resting on Newt’s arm. 

Together they watched the warm calm break.

“Is this--” shouted Newt, over the cacophony.

“Probably,” she shouted back, and made to kiss him. She would have succeeded, too, if she hadn’t at that moment noticed Mr. Young, running down the street.

“Have you seen my son!” he called to them.

The colour drained out of Anathema’s face.

“No,” Newt said, loud and clear. 

Mr. Young gave him a suspicious look, but he didn’t maintain it, and it was soon crumbling into something closer to a whole separate kind of fear.

“My car wouldn’t start,” he said. “First time in thirty years it hasn’t started.”

“I’m sorry,” said Newt.

Mr. Young nodded, and hurried on.

It started to rain.

“We’re going to die,” said Anathema, wonderingly.

Newt said:

“We should go inside.”

“All right,” said Anathema. 

They got up and went inside. The door closed, behind them.

 

It rained over a plain in Mongolia: first on a woman, walking, and then, without any kind of logical transition, on all the people who had, yesterday, been in the airport doing all the things that people do in airports, and who today were looking up.

Yoon Sun looked around her. She thought, perhaps now I am hallucinating.

It was good, though, to see her newly reappeared manager stammering at the place where the baggage claim had been. “My baggage,” he said, pointing.

“It’s gone,” she told him helpfully.

He looked at her like she was speaking a language he had known a long time ago. 

She patted his shoulder. “Mine, too,” she said, and ambled off before he could respond, hands in the pockets of her nicely tailored suit. The crowd let her by.

It was a pity that she’d left home, she thought. But now her husband would be seeing the same bruised sky overhead; he would be feeling the same cold on his scalp. The idea of it, small and perfect, made her smile in the dark.

 

This time, the tree did close its branches over him, so that Jaime found himself sitting in a globe of green.

He could still hear the rain, though. And the other things that were falling.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he told the tree. 

A gust of wind ran through the heart-shaped leaves, like a sigh. 

“It’s not that I’m not grateful,” said Jaime. “But what is, is.”

There was a stubborn pause. Then, stiffly, the limbs below his on the trunk fanned out, until he could see the canopy below, and hear voices, floating up.

He looked, a little sadly, at the arching roof of wood and vine. 

Then he climbed down to meet the voices. 

And as he neared the canopy, he began to see parts of the sky around the umbrella of the tree’s crown, boiling and yellow and sick. What was, was, he thought, but he still trembled against the bark.

 

The rain made circles on the surface of Cross River.

Not far off, a woman whose nametag had read Mbeke and was now a blur of bleeding ink had just given up on trying to start a fire. She was too old to learn new tricks, she decided. Certainly not new tricks involving combustion using only two sticks and a nonfunctioning cigarette lighter. Maybe if she’d had a source of flame to start out with, but that was one thing the department store hadn’t stocked.

“Here,” said someone, “let me help you with that.”

Mbeke stared at the someone, who looked like he’d been one of the ferrymen before all the ferries sank. He was holding matches out like peace offerings.

“You go ahead,” she said, getting out of his way.

He set to work.

There were other people, now, emerging from between the trees. Mbeke said, “Sit, sit,” and they sat, most of them, holding their bare arms over their heads against what water drizzled down through the tangle of the gum trees. They sat and watched fire spring to sputtering life.

 

The guard at the airbase had fallen into an uneasy sleep not long after being bashed over the head by the madwoman. 

He woke to rain, and the dulcet bellows of Sergeant Thomas A. Deisenburger, who’d had what he could only assume was a long nap himself, and a very nice dream, and who was feeling rather embarrassed about it. The good sergeant couldn’t remember any details, but the taste of apple pie lingered frustratingly, and on the whole a little bellowing seemed only appropriate.

When the guard’s whites were the only part of his eyes still showing, Sgt. Deisenburger nodded with grim satisfaction and marched back to the gate with the warm feeling of an unpleasant surprise well delegated.

Unfortunately, he was met there by another unpleasant surprise, this one wrapped in a dirty mack and a strange haze of smugness[1]. Also a lady he thought he recognised, in the uncertain way you recognise people in dreams.

“Ye’re not goin’ t’ give us any trouble, are ye?” said the horrible little man in the mack. He jabbed Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger in the stomach with what had probably once been a finger. It bounced off the underlying abdominal musculature, but this did not really make Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger feel any better about the proceedings.

Technically, he was only forbidden from letting people  _into_  the base without correct authorisation. 

“No,” said Sgt. Deisenburger. He went to press the button, but the gate was already raised, so he turned the gesture into a salute. “You have a nice night,” he said.

“Thank you, officer,” said the lady, beaming at him. 

“Not bloody likely,” said her companion.

The lady herded him out and down to the road. She picked up an off-white scooter that had been lying, unnoticed, in the dust, and she got on that, and the little man got on behind her, and they scooted away. 

Sgt. Deisenburger watched them go. Then he lowered the gate. 

There was a crack of lightning. It illuminated the heavens, in great and impossible detail. Sgt. Deisenburger, very deliberately, pulled his helmet down over his eyes. He was prepared to do his job, for just as long as the night would let him.

[1] It should be said that this was justified smugness. A lot can happen, in a day spent outside the purview of a story. 

 

A lot, and almost certainly not enough. But it would have to do.

The rain washed away the charred remains, running in an inky slurry down the slope.

“I’ve thought of something else we had to lose,” said Crowley.

Aziraphale picked himself up off the chalk. 

“What?” he said blearily. “What are you talking about?”

Crowley pointed up with the end of his tail.

Aziraphale looked.

“Oh. My God,” he said, with perfect accuracy, and sat down again, heavily. “But surely the-- I thought-- the correct  _moment_ \--”

“I don’t think they care, anymore,” said Crowley. “About moments. About anything, really, but their chance.”

There was a space that should have been full of awful silence and was instead full of awful noise.

“Listen,” Crowley said, when he was beyond listening. “This is  _better_ , isn’t it?”

“Better?” said Aziraphale.

The Earth shook. He pressed a little closer to the cliff.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Crowley, “and-- it’s better that we do it to them, all at once.”

Aziraphale passed a hand over his face. “Sorry?”

“Better than them doing it to them, I mean. Than  _him_ doing it to them, a little bit at a time.”

He hesitated.

“Isn’t it?”

There is no reading the expressions of snakes, but his eyes were intent on Aziraphale’s face. 

The demon looked like he had when the world was gleaming and new, Aziraphale thought. He wished he could bring himself to stop looking back.

They both turned, though, when Pepper began to laugh.

She laughed like a little girl, high and uncontrollable and clear. She laughed and laughed. Rain and blood dripped down her face, painting it a shade of pink more usually found on the Disney channel, and she laughed. 

Soon even Wensleydale was smiling, thinly. Brian had changed the fastest, without the mortality of a former Horseperson to slow down the reaction taking place in his soul, and he no longer had much in the way of a mouth; but he shimmered with all the humor of grease. 

And:

HA, HA, HA, said Death, who had been there the whole time. 

He moved into their sight like the shadow that detaches itself from the dark doorway just after you come to the conclusion that yes, you are alone, and set about making silly faces in the mirror. He was only seven feet tall, but seven feet went a long way, in that children’s paradise. His robe curled around his anklebones like the edge of night. The effect was marred a little by a few crusts of snow still caught in some of the folds; but if anyone noticed, she kept it to herself.

For a moment he looked quite thoughtful, for a skull. 

Then he raised his scythe.

NOW, he said. COME AND SEE.

The Them faded with him. The laughter went on, singing louder than the storm.

“Of course it is,” said Aziraphale. 

Crowley looked at him. 

“Better,” he said. He put his hands together in his lap, for warmth. 

Crowley made no response to this. Golden lightning stitched across the sky.

“That’ll be the Metatron,” the angel said. “He’s almost as mad as Michael for javelins[1].”

In the thunder that followed, there was a detectable buzzing.

“Beelzebub,” said Crowley, unnecessarily.

A lull, as both sides took stock of the damage. Aziraphale said,

“We do still have jobs, it would appear.”

Crowley loosened his hold on Aziraphale’s wrist, one loop at a time going slack. “You really think they’ll take us?” he said.

Aziraphale smiled bitterly. “After this? I’d imagine all is forgiven, and then some.”

Crowley wished he had hands. He could have stared at them. Staring at Aziraphale’s hands was not quite the same, and besides, the angel had that niche filled.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. So we’ll be called up, soon, then, do you think?”

“Mm,” said Aziraphale.

A concentrated glob of rain hit him on the nose, and a thought appeared to strike him with the water. It was in all probability going to be a bit of a wait. So, carefully, he shook his wings out and put them over his head, to shield himself from the last drops of the world.

“You were saying?” he murmured.

Crowley blinked.

“We’ll go when we’re called,” he said. He was redoing his loops, already, to take advantage, as much as possible, of the feathery cover.

“When we’re called,” Aziraphale agreed, leaning back.

[1] In fact the Metatron preferred boomerangs. But Aziraphale had never been very good at certain kinds of terminology.

 

If you want to imagine the future… 

…don’t.

But you could, if you wanted, imagine a desert.

The sand in the desert would be black, and the sky in the desert would be black, and the mountains at the end of the desert would be deepest midnight[1]. The stars would be white, with a tinge of blue. 

And there would be a boy.

“Hullo?” Adam said. “Anybody there?”

YOU APPEAR TO HAVE BEATEN THE RUSH, said Death. 

Adam swivelled around, sand crunching under his trainers. “Where is this?” he said.

THE DESERT, said Death, simply.

Panic rose in Adam’s eyes.

“I’m not s’posed to be here,” he said. “I ought to be in Tadfield. I was always s’posed to be in Tadfield.”

I MUST ADMIT, Death said, I DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE YOU HERE SO SOON.

“Yeah! That’s it, see? There’s been some mistake,” said Adam, more confidently. He moved his hand, and concentrated. 

Nothing happened.

THIS IS NOT YOUR GROUND, said Death.

Adam stared at him.

“All the more reason f’r me to--”

TADFIELD IS NO MORE YOURS THAN THIS, Death interrupted. NOT ANY LONGER.

“But I,” said Adam. “That’s not.” 

He stopped. He was remembering things, few of them pleasant. 

“But,” he said again, softly, and then,  _"Tadfield,"_   as if he might break the word if he spoke it carelessly.

Death watched him touch his chest, and then his cheek.

“Where  _do_  I go?” he said, in an entirely different kind of voice. 

Death considered this for a while. Then he shrugged. 

WHERE HUMANS GO, he said. He tapped a bony phalange to his temple. YOU HAVE TO WALK THE DESERT FIRST, MIND.

“Huh,” said Adam. 

He stuck his hands in his pockets. He slouched in. “I guess there’s no way Dog could--”

YOU GUESS CORRECTLY, said Death.

Adam deflated further. Death regarded him with the polite and uncomprehending sympathy of a born cat person.

“I wasn’t a very good master, anyway,” the boy said sadly, kicking the sand. “There was so much to do.”

YES.

Adam looked around at the sprawl of the dunes: a sea of silken black rolling from horizon to horizon.

“I could make this ol’ desert bloom, I bet,” he said, and there was a glint in his eye that had nothing to do with the starlight. “If I  _really_  tried.”

WILL YOU? said Death. If you were looking for it, you might have heard a trace of nervousness, in the depths of his cold voice.

Adam considered this.

There had been so much, in his head. And now there was memory and pain and him, Adam, who he recognised.

“Nah,” he said at last. “It’s a good desert. I guess sometimes people need deserts.”

Death grinned.

SOMETIMES, he said, and he went. 

“Where humans go,” Adam said aloud, though there was no longer anyone to hear. 

He smiled. It hurt almost as much as it hurt to think, but he’d been expecting that, so he didn’t stop. And not so very many minutes later, still smiling, he set out over the sand.

[1] Black.

 


End file.
